On August 9, nationwide internet blackouts occurred in Belarus. Here's a first look at what our tools and datasets can tell us about the magnitude of these outages and their impact.
The population of Belarus is about 9,5 million, with 75-80% of them being active Internet users (figures vary according to sources, see below). , и ). The main provider of fixed Internet communications for these users is the national telecommunications company of Belarus Beltelecom, and the main providers of mobile communications are MTS and A1 Mobile.
What we see in RIPE Atlas
On Sunday, August 9, the day of the country's presidential election, massive internet outages occurred, partially disrupting the ability of the people of Belarus to communicate with the rest of the world via the Internet. Since then, questions have been constantly raised about the extent of these shutdowns and their consequences.
The RIPE Atlas service we provide allows anyone, anywhere, to create various kinds of useful internet measurements.
plans for our publications
The RIPE Atlas system will be devoted to a series of our detailed articles on Habré in the near future. However, this system is regularly mentioned on Habré, here are a few articles:
The service consists of a network of probes distributed around the world. On the day that the outages occurred in Belarus, we saw that a significant number of probes in the country were out of order. from RIPEstat gives an idea of the scale:
more plans for our publications
Articles about the RIPE Stat system are also planned.
As we can see here, on August 8, 19 out of 21 probes located in Belarus were operating normally. Two days later, only 6 of them were still connected to the RIPE Atlas network. A 70% drop in the number of connected probes in the country in one day is a notable phenomenon that is consistent with broader reports of the extent of the shutdown.
Of all the probes that remained connected, all were located in the autonomous system (AS) of the national service provider Beltelecom. The map below shows the situation with the RIPE Atlas probes at approximately 16:00 on August 11, when only one of them, located in another AS, returned to the network:
As of the morning of August 12, all probes that have been disconnected since August 8 have reconnected to the system. You can check the current status of probes in Belarus at .
What we see in our Routing Information Service (RIS)
and more plans for our publications
And about RIS there will also be our publications on Habré.
Also on August 9, we saw a decrease in the visibility of routes for Belarusian networks. If we look at the BGP data collected using our Route Information Service (RIS) - this data is available in , we will see that for some time on this day, the number of visible IPv4 prefixes decreased by just over 10%, from 1044 to 922. The next day, their number recovered.
But as for IPv6 prefixes, the change was more pronounced. A total of 56 of the 94 IPv6 prefixes that were visible to BGP early Sunday morning disappeared just after 06:00. This is a 60% drop. This situation continued until approximately 04:45 on August 12, when the number of prefixes increased back to 94.
It should be noted that the IPv4 prefixes that hosted the RIPE Atlas probes that were disabled that day were still visible. However, the fact that a route is visible in BGP is not in itself indicative of the reachability of hosts on the respective networks.
Do your own analysis
As a neutral source of information, we actively contribute to maintaining the health and stability of the Internet. We offer a range of tools and services to help you gain a clearer picture of how the Internet functions at any given time.
Much of the above is based on what we see in , which provides visualizations for route data collected in RIS, data from RIPE Atlas probes deployed by country, and other country data. They can be obtained by anyone who wants to track Internet events in the same way that we did in this article. If you are interested in further investigating outages yourself, there are many more widgets available in RIPEstat that you can use to get more information.
You can also dig into which we collect and make available to everyone. Or explore the current situation in more detail yourself by creating your own Internet measurements in .
Conclusions
The data we have on the Internet outages that occurred in Belarus last Sunday, together with other reports since then, point to large-scale disruptions to a number of networks that should have had a noticeable impact on Internet users in the country. Although some of their follow-ups were quite lengthy - several RIPE Atlas probes were not available for several days, and a significant number of IPv6 prefixes disappeared from BGP for the same period - everything seems to be back to normal as of this morning (Aug 12) .
It is also clear that this was not a total shutdown during which the entire country lost all connection to the global Internet. Several RIPE Atlas probes remained connected at all times. And as noted, many routes and ASNs remained visible in BGP all along; although, as already stated, this in itself does not mean that the hosts on the respective networks were also available during the outages.
In general, this is only the very first glance at the situation, and there is still much room for further analysis. We invite and encourage everyone to use all the tools and data sets that the RIPE NCC has to offer in order to better understand these recent developments and their impact on the Internet as a whole.
Source: habr.com