Some European mobile traffic was rerouted through China Telecom due to a BGP leak at a Swiss colocation company which was accused of a similar mistake in 2018
It was China Telecom, again. The same ISP accused last year of “hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries.”
Context & Ripple Effects
This leak lands a year after researchers detailed how state-owned China Telecom regularly hijacks traffic passing through the US and Canada, which is why an 'accidental' BGP leak from a Swiss colocation provider reads as more than a routing bug: the same carrier accused of exploiting its backbone position is once again on the receiving end of misdirected European mobile traffic.
First-order effects
- European mobile operators whose subscriber traffic transited China Telecom face immediate exposure questions — session data for some users crossed a network already flagged by researchers as systematically capturing foreign routes.
- The Swiss colocation company now carries a documented pattern: a second major routing incident after its accused 2018 mistake, putting its operator customers' trust and contracts directly at risk.
Second-order effects
- Every downstream ISP and CDN evaluating peering with either the colocation provider or China Telecom must now price in route-leak risk, accelerating adoption of route filtering and RPKI-style validation among carriers that had deferred it.
- The incident hands ammunition to Western governments already weighing restrictions on state-owned Chinese carriers' points of presence, following the same logic applied to other telecom infrastructure scrutinized since the Belgacom investigation.
Third-order effects
- Repeated leaks through state-linked carriers — this one, and the later rerouting of CDN and cloud traffic through Russia's Rostelecom — push the industry toward treating interdomain routing as a national-security surface rather than a purely technical one, with regulators likely to mandate origin validation for critical networks.
- If accidental leaks keep producing the same exposure as deliberate hijacks, BGP security stops being a best-practice debate and becomes a procurement requirement for mobile operators and cloud providers alike.
The trend: Interdomain routing failures involving state-owned carriers are converting BGP hygiene from an engineering nicety into a geopolitical and regulatory issue.