Someone working at the search giant certainly didn’t sleep well on Friday after knocking half of Japan offline

Aug 28, 2017 10:08 GMT  ·  By

Google accidentally toggled the Internet switch to off in Japan last Friday, with customers of the biggest ISPs in the country unable to connect to the web for several hours.

Google’s big oops moment took place after the company broke down a Border Gateway Protocol (also referred to as BGP) with a configuration error causing false announced peer prefixes sent to Verizon. This in turn caused Internet providers like NTT Communications and KDDI Corp. to be left without an Internet connection, with the luckiest of customers “only” experiencing a terribly slow connection.

NTT’s Internet service, called OCN, is being used by nearly 7.7 million home users and 480,000 companies and is the largest in Japan.

Google: Sorry, fixed!

Google admitted the mistake in a statement issued to Japanese media, explaining that it corrected the bad configuration in just 8 minutes. The outage, however, lasted for several hours, and was first experienced at 12:22 PM local time on August 25. At approximately 3:50 PM the same time, several businesses were still reporting Internet connection issues, including brokerage firm Rakuten Securities.

“We set wrong information for the network and, as a result, problems occurred. We modified the information to the correct one within eight minutes. We apologize for causing inconvenience and anxieties,” a company spokesperson was quoted as saying.

It goes without saying that the outage affected several companies and services, including online trading giants, flea market app Mercari, and communications app Line. East Japan Railway company, Resona Bank, Kinki Osaka Bank, and others also experienced Internet hiccups.

Just as expected, the issue didn’t sit well with Japan authorities, with the local Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications announcing an investigation.

“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 for this network towards Google. Not only did this happen for Jastel, but thousands of other networks as well,” investigators said.