[Geenirvana]

From someone who does full understand BGP, I have a question

Somewhere, a BGP route was misconfigured to send data somewhere else. What would happen if a BGP route was terminating at China, and the bad actor who made it happen, decided that they are not going to fix it and just leave it.

How would the rest of the BGP network deal with it?

[dsr_]

While investigating the alarms, a network engineer at each major network will decide to stop taking routes from the Chinese network making the advertisements, and everything will sort itself out... as far as that network is concerned.

[Hikikomori]

Just to clarify, it was a small Nigerian ISP that caused this, CT just propagated it to others. It's likely that this Nigerian ISP was setting up peering with Google and misconfigured their route policy. If you do this incorrectly you can advertise prefixes you get from one peer to other peers as if you own it. (essentially you replace the full AS path (prefix metadata in BGP) with your own AS number, it makes it looks like you originated the prefix to others) If neither the Nigerian ISP or CT refused to do anything then everyone that is their peer or customer would need to manually filter this "bad" prefix" to stop it. Customers and ISPs that only use CT would still be affected.