The Effects of the Russo-Ukrainian War on Network Infrastructures Through the Lens of BGP

Abstract

One of the most critical building blocks of the reliable operation of the Internet is the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) that is used to exchange routing messages, signaling active and defective routing paths. During large-scale catastrophic incidents, such as conventional military operations or cyberwarfare, the stability of the Internet is affected, causing the announcements of defective routing paths to increase substantially. This work studies the relation between major incidents, such as armed conflicts in a country scale, and the corresponding network outages observed in the core of the Internet infrastructure as announced by BGP. We focus on the Russo-Ukrainian war as a timely and prominent use case and examine geolocalized BGP data for a 2-month period. Our methodology allows us to cherry-pick long-term network outages among temporary interruptions of service in this specific time window, and pinpoint them to the areas of the operations. Our results indicate that there is a high correlation between the start of military operations and network outages in a city and country level. Furthermore, we show that the last few days before the start of the operations network outages rise as well, indicating that preparatory cyberattack activities take place. No less important, network outages remain at much higher than usual levels during the operations, something that can be attributed to infrastructure destruction possibly backed by cyberattacks.