Some Google traffic rerouted through Russia, China, Nigeria for 1.5 hours

Nov. 12 (UPI) -- Some users of Google services encountered disruptions for about 1 1/2 hours Monday because traffic was re-routed through other networks in Russia, China and Nigeria.

The issue with Google Cloud IP, including search and cloud-hosting services as well as G Suite connectivity, was resolved at 2:35 p.m. Pacific time, Google said in a posting.

"Throughout the duration of this issue Google services were operating as expected and we believe the root cause of the issue was external to Google," the company said. "We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimize future recurrence."

ThousandEyes, an Internet research company, posted in a blog incorrect routing instructions redirected some traffic intended for Google's addresses to Russian network operator TransTelekom, China Telecom Corp. and MainOne, a provider in Nigeria.

Consumer apps including YouTube were also affected by slowdowns.

"Between 1:00 PM and 2:23 PM PST, ThousandEyes noticed issues connecting to G Suite, a critical application for our organization," ThousandEye's Ameet Naik wrote. "Reviewing ThousandEyes Endpoint Agent stats, we noticed this was impacting all users at the ThousandEyes office. The outage not only affected G Suite, but also Google Search as well as Google Analytics.

"What caught our attention was that traffic to Google was getting dropped at China Telecom. Why would traffic from a San Francisco office traversing to Google go all the way to China? We also noticed a Russian ISP in the traffic path, which definitely sparked some concerns."

G Suite includes Gmail, Google Drive and Google Docs.

"This incident at a minimum caused a massive denial of service to G Suite and Google Search," Naik wrote. "However, this also put valuable Google traffic in the hands of ISPs in countries with a long history of Internet surveillance."

No data was compromised with encryption preventing any exploit, Google told The Wall Street Journal.