The Effect of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict from the Perspective of Internet eXchanges

Abstract

In 2022 the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. It is known that Ukraine faced outages because of the damage to their infrastructure. It is also known that Russia was boycotted by the international community. However the impact on the telecommunications of the two countries remains unknown. In this paper we quantified the degree to which the Internet was affected in both countries by analyzing routing tables from five large Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). IXPs provide a central point of interconnection where internet traffic can be freely exchanged between Autonomous Systems (ASes). This centrality makes IXPs a good vantage point for analyzing changes in the Internet infrastructure. With data collected before and after the start of the conflict we observed considerable damage to the Ukrainian Internet network with numerous outages and minimal damage to the Russian network. An average of 11.12% of Ukrainian ASes were unreachable at each IXP. We identified the biggest outages and the events responsible for them. This paper highlights resilience issues during conflicts to the network and management community, and serves as a basis for future more in-depth research.