Discovery Radar #16: BGP Anomalies Linked to Venezuela Blackout

Radar #16 from Low Orbit Security Highlights Border Gateway Protocol Anomalies During Venezuela Blackout

Radar #16 from Low Orbit Security reports Border Gateway Protocol anomalies during the week of 01/05/2026, coinciding with a blackout in Venezuela. The finding matters because Border Gateway Protocol routing is the backbone of how packets travel across the internet, and outages in power and infrastructure can ripple into routing behavior. Radar’s weekly snapshot helps researchers see how interdomain routing responds when a country’s networks lose power. This observation adds another data point about how outages on a large scale influence internet reachability.

Context and Significance

To see why this matters, let's take a quick look at the problem space. When electricity goes out, routers and exchanges can go offline or operate with degraded capacity. Even if the physical links stay up, the control planes that decide where traffic goes can behave differently, producing sudden route changes or reachability gaps. Detecting these patterns in near real time helps operators and researchers distinguish between local device failures, misconfigurations, and broader routing shifts caused by the disruption. In other words, it’s a diagnostic lens on the internet’s resilience during a crisis.

Radar Methodology and Data Sources

Border Gateway Protocol is the mechanism by which different networks announce what routes they can reach and how to reach them. In practice, BGP updates propagate across thousands of networks, and the system relies on trust and stable configurations to keep traffic flowing. When a blackout hits a region, power loss can cascade through routers, servers, and cooling systems, increasing the chances of churn in announcements or unexpected path changes. Analysts study these signals to infer which parts of the internet are most vulnerable and how quickly services recover after an outage. For everyday users, that could mean services come back faster after a disruption.

What Radar typically does is monitor publicly observable routing data to flag anomalies in BGP announcements. In the Venezuela case, the week-long signal points to irregular route changes that lined up with the blackout, a pattern researchers will compare against outage reports and network topology data. Radar’s approach emphasizes cross-checking signals from multiple vantage points and looking for synchronized deviations rather than isolated glitches. While the exact mechanisms behind a given spike can be multifaceted, the consistent alignment with the sustained outage supports the idea of a causal link between the power disruption and routing instability. For context on how these analyses are usually conducted, researchers rely on data streams from sources like CAIDA and public route collectors to map interdomain routing behavior, a topic covered by institutions focused on internet infrastructure. CAIDA BGP data provides one well-used foundation for this kind of work, while practical tools at RIPE Atlas give researchers a network-wide view of reachability and performance. BGP basics from the Internet Society help readers understand the underlying mechanics behind these observations. The Radar #16 report is a reminder that even routine internet infrastructure can reveal new dynamics when a major outage occurs. Radar #16

From a practical standpoint, the Venezuela episode shows how crises expose limits in redundancy and planning across autonomous systems. If routing paths pivot to fewer or less diverse routes during an outage, users may experience slower connections, intermittent access, or longer detours as traffic is rehydrated across different networks. This is not a red flag about individual networks alone; it reflects how interdependent the global internet has become. By documenting these anomalies, researchers can guide operators toward better isolation of failure domains and more reliable failover strategies that preserve connectivity even when critical infrastructure is compromised. The broader takeaway is not that routing will always behave badly during outages, but that monitoring and quick attribution matter for maintaining service during stressful events. The ongoing work, including cross-referencing datasets from CAIDA and RIPE Atlas, will help separate coincidence from causation in future outages. RIPE Atlas and CAIDA data provide concrete avenues for researchers to test hypotheses about routing resilience in real time.