Google error breaks down internet in Japan

Where living without internet has almost become impossible, Japan recently lost its internet access because of Google’s blunder.

Japan, which is considered as one of the world’s most technologically advanced countries, lost half of its internet connection due to Google, though only for a few hours.

The Next Web informs that on Friday, half of Japan’s internet broke down after the tech giant Google accidently ‘botched a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)’. Industries including banking sector, gaming sites and train reservation services were highly affected due to this break down.

Though the outage lasted for few minutes, its effects lasted for hours. It was so severe that the country’s Internal Affairs and Communications ministries had to step-in, in order to initiate an investigation regarding the outage. The minister’s findings were as follows, “Google accidentally became a transit provider for Jastel by announcing peer prefixes to Verizon. Since Verizon would select this path to Jastel it would have sent traffic to this network towards Google. Not only did this happen for Jastel, but thousands of other networks as well.”

What this actually means is that the firm doesn’t provide or offer transit provider services on its platform and once when it accidentally did, the system became nonfunctional causing no internet in Japan in return, writes Tech Juice.

Google’s error made it seem as if a large chunk of IP addresses were available for internet traffic to be routed through Google. But, those IP addresses actually belonged to Japanese internet service providers. So a large amount of traffic that was meant for Japan was suddenly sent towards Google by major internet service providers like Verizon. But Google isn't a service provider and isn't meant to route traffic, so all of that traffic destined for Japan was basically just sent nowhere, reported Engadget.

Furthermore, Google has taken responsibility for its role in the internet breakdown. A spokesperson of Google, while talking to Japanese media outlet said, “We set wrong information for the network and, as a result, problems occurred. We apologize for causing inconvenience and anxieties.”