China Re-Routed US Internet Traffic for 2.5 Years

For two and a half years China Telecom re-routed a lot of U.S. internet traffic to China. It’s not clear if it was intentional or a mistake.
As the following traceroute from December 3, 2017 shows, traffic originating in Los Angeles first passed through a China Telecom facility in Hangzhou, China, before reaching its final stop in Washington, DC. The problematic route, which is visualized in the graphic above, was the result of China Telecom inserting itself into the inbound path of Verizon Asian Pacific.
Now, it could be a bug in the internet’s Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). Or it could have been malicious (ALLEGEDLY) seeing how Washington D.C.’s traffic was compromised.