China Telecom, and not Cogent Communications, was the network behind Thursday's network outages in London that cut access to WhatsApp.
Based on information from monitoring company ThousandEyes, FierceTelecom had previously reported that the outages were due to a Cogent data center in London.
After declining to comment on Thursday, Cogent said the following via email Friday morning: "We had no incident reports in our London Data Center yesterday." An email from ThousandEyes Friday afternoon said the issue was due to China Telecom and provided the following information:
"What we can share now is that Cogent, like many service providers, accepted a route leak that originated from a Swiss colocation company called Safe Host and was propagated by China Telecom (a Cogent peer). Due to this route leak, China Telecom was inserted into the internet path for many services. Unfortunately, China Telecom either dropped the traffic or was suffering significant packet loss that impacted these services.
"In the case of WhatsApp, Cogent’s routers in London were the last hops in the internet path that handed off traffic to China Telecom. Our further analysis is showing that the likely source of the packet loss occurred in the connection between Cogent’s and China Telecom’s networks. Since we saw significant evidence of packet loss at other points in China Telecom’s network, it is likely that China Telecom was the provider that dropped the traffic."
With over 57,400 route miles of intercity fiber and more than 33,600 metro fiber miles, Cogent offers its services in North America, Europe and Asia. The company provides its services to more than 202 major markets and interconnects with over 6,660 other networks.
RELATED: Google pinpoints root cause of Sunday's outage
Google Cloud dealt with a widespread network outage on Sunday. Google Cloud's Sunday outage was due to a server configuration change. On Thursday, Google Cloud provided a detailed description of the issues and circumstances that led to the outage.
Sunday's outage, which started on the East Coast and lasted more than four hours, impacted social media companies, such as Snapchat, that rely on Google Cloud as well as Google's own services, including YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, G Suite, Google Drive, Nest, and Google Docs.
Benjamin Treynor Sloss, Google's vice president of engineering, explained in a blog post that the configuration change was intended for a small number of servers in a single region.