Most of the comments on both threads about this story center on whether this is malicious activity by China Telecom on behalf of the PRC. My sense is those commenters perhaps haven't read the actual story closely.
What happened here is that a small Swiss provider, Safe Host, accidentally advertised routes it shouldn't have (those routes may also have been AS-padded, as a safeguard to make them less attractive as primary routes). China Telecom mistakenly propagated those routes, and in doing so became the preferred path for a bunch of prefixes.
There appear to have been two mistakes here. China Telecom's was in propagating the Safe Host advertisements, but the crucial mistake happened at Safe Host in Switzerland, by leaking those routes in the first place.
I understand the impulse to want to live on an exciting cyberpunk Internet where major governments are constantly manipulating BGP4 to capture WhatsApp traffic or whatever, but these "mistakes" are almost always just mistakes. It doesn't help that BGP4 itself is a clownfire of mistakes duct-taped together with other mistakes: significant chunks of global Internet routing policy are bound up in regular expressions.
>I understand the impulse to want to live on an exciting cyberpunk Internet
I don't think you do. On the contrary many people have no such impulse and in fact never wanted or expected such scenarios to be a realistic concern.
It's scary. Undo this story and take back your cyber punks, please. Just the possibility it was malicious, snd that's not necessarily an indictment of China alone in the post Snowden era, is reason to seep up BGP improvements.
This incident once again proves that implementing RPKI is a major steps that needs to happen to keep routing on the internet managable and above all else, secure and trustworthy.
My thoughts exactly. Once is an accident. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. And this kind of $#@! has happened way more than three times.
Also, please: "Operators, where are your MANRS?"
https://www.manrs.org/