Internet 'hijack' sees Google traffic misdirected through China and Russia in possible war-game experiment

Large parts of the internet went down for more than an hour on Monday after a strange incident meant web traffic intended to reach Google was rerouted through China and Russia. The web giant said its search engine, as well as apps like Spotify that rely on its services, stopped working as a result. Google did not reveal how many users were affected, though researchers from the network-intelligence company ThousandEyes reported instances of web traffic being redirected from the UK, France and the US. The researchers said the misdirected traffic was of particular concern given the list of countries through which large amounts of sensitive data was passing. The incident "put valuable Google traffic in the hands of ISPs in countries with a long history of internet surveillance," ThousandEyes researcher Ameet Naik wrote in a blog post.