AWS us-west-2 routed through Europe from NY?

I've seen a few strange instances where IP addresses in the AWS us-west-2 region (Oregon) are routed through Europe if you start the traceroute from some providers in the northern East Coast (Quebec, New York). Any idea what's going on? I assume it's temporary.

* florin@andrei.myip.org (Florin Andrei) [Fri 28 Apr 2017, 21:12 CEST]:

I've seen a few strange instances where IP addresses in the AWS us-west-2 region (Oregon) are routed through Europe if you start the traceroute from some providers in the northern East Coast (Quebec, New York). Any idea what's going on? I assume it's temporary.

Can you be a little bit more vague in your problem description? While ommitting the source networks from where you tried, you still included the destination. The list expects better.

  -- Niels.

Sorry. Here's one source: 104.163.180.188

Hey Florin,

Do you have a traceroute showing the issue? FYI, you can test against any
of the IPs listed here under US-West-2, they all respond to ICMP requests.

http://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/

-Phil

Phil,

The traceroute was done by a coworker in Quebec on April 26, from one of our corporate offices. His IP address was probably 104.163.180.188 at the time. He was tracing one of our endpoints in AWS us-west-2; I do not know which IPs our endpoint had at the time, but one of its current IPs is 52.89.73.31

This is the trace as he described it:

Route
- #1: 2.7 ms
   IP Address: 192.168.1.1
   Hostname: local
   TTL: 64
- #2: 34.8 ms
   IP Address: 10.170.162.238
   TTL: 50
- #3: 17.3 ms
   IP Address: 10.170.192.53
   TTL: 250
- #4: 16.7 ms
   IP Address: 74.116.184.145
   Hostname: 0.xe-11-1-0.er1.mtl7.ebox.ca
   TTL: 249
   AS Number: AS1403
   AS Name: EBOX
   Country Name: Canada
   Country Code: CA
   Time Zone: America/Toronto
   Region: Quebec
   City: Vieux-Saint-Laurent
   Latitude: 45.475
   Longitude: -73.696
- #5: 15.6 ms
   IP Address: 213.248.76.201
   Hostname: motl-b1-link.telia.net
   TTL: 248
   AS Number: AS1299
   AS Name: Telia Company AB
   Country Name: Europe
   Country Code: EU
   Time Zone: Europe/Vaduz
- #6: 31.8 ms
   IP Address: 62.115.134.52
   Hostname: nyk-bb4-link.telia.net
   TTL: 247
   AS Number: AS1299
   AS Name: Telia Company AB
   Country Name: Europe
   Country Code: EU
   Time Zone: Europe/Vaduz
- #7: 47.7 ms
   IP Address: 213.155.136.19
   Hostname: chi-b21-link.telia.net
   TTL: 246
   AS Number: AS1299
   AS Name: Telia Company AB
   Country Name: Europe
   Country Code: EU
   Time Zone: Europe/Vaduz
- #8: 89.7 ms
   IP Address: 62.115.117.48
   Hostname: sea-b1-link.telia.net
   TTL: 245
   AS Number: AS1299
   AS Name: Telia Company AB
   Country Name: Europe
   Country Code: EU
   Time Zone: Europe/Vaduz
- #9: 90.7 ms
   IP Address: 62.115.34.102
   Hostname: amazon-ic-302508-sea-b1.c.telia.net
   TTL: 244
   AS Number: AS1299
   AS Name: Telia Company AB
   Country Name: Europe
   Country Code: EU
   Time Zone: Europe/Vaduz
- #10: 86.3 ms
   IP Address: 52.95.52.80
   TTL: 239
   Country Name: United States
   Country Code: US
   Time Zone: America/Los_Angeles
   Region: Washington
   City: Seattle
   Latitude: 47.634
   Longitude: -122.342
- #11: 80.8 ms
   IP Address: 52.95.52.97
   TTL: 241
   Country Name: United States
   Country Code: US
   Time Zone: America/Los_Angeles
   Region: Washington
   City: Seattle
   Latitude: 47.634
   Longitude: -122.342
- #12: 86.1 ms
   IP Address: 54.239.43.124
   TTL: 240
   Country Name: United States
   Country Code: US
   Time Zone: America/Los_Angeles
   Region: Washington
   City: Seattle
   Latitude: 47.610
   Longitude: -122.334
- #13: 94.3 ms
   IP Address: 52.93.13.12
   TTL: 235
   Country Name: United States
   Country Code: US
   Time Zone: America/Los_Angeles
   Region: Oregon
   City: Boardman
   Latitude: 45.870
   Longitude: -119.688
- #14: 86.5 ms
   IP Address: 52.93.12.249
   TTL: 238
   Country Name: United States
   Country Code: US
   Time Zone: America/Los_Angeles
   Region: Oregon
   City: Boardman
   Latitude: 45.870
   Longitude: -119.688
- #15: 111.7 ms
   IP Address: 52.93.12.140
   TTL: 234
   Country Name: United States
   Country Code: US
   Time Zone: America/Los_Angeles
   Region: Oregon
   City: Boardman
   Latitude: 45.870
   Longitude: -119.688
- #16: 92.6 ms
   IP Address: 52.93.12.173
   TTL: 234
   Country Name: United States
   Country Code: US
   Time Zone: America/Los_Angeles
   Region: Oregon
   City: Boardman
   Latitude: 45.870
   Longitude: -119.688
- #17: 88.3 ms
   IP Address: 52.93.15.217
   TTL: 236
   Country Name: United States
   Country Code: US
   Time Zone: America/Los_Angeles
   Region: Oregon
   City: Boardman
   Latitude: 45.870
   Longitude: -119.688
- #18: N/A
   TTL: 0

We expected that trace to go straight East Coast / West Coast, but instead it went through Europe.

For comparison, this is a trace also by same coworker to api.postmates.com, which was correctly routed on the shortest geographical path (more or less):

Route
- #1: 3.0 ms
   IP Address: 192.168.1.1
   Hostname: local
   TTL: 64
- #2: 29.0 ms
   IP Address: 10.170.162.238
   TTL: 50
- #3: 17.9 ms
   IP Address: 10.170.192.53
   TTL: 250
- #4: 19.7 ms
   IP Address: 74.116.184.145
   Hostname: 0.xe-11-1-0.er1.mtl7.ebox.ca
   TTL: 249
   AS Number: AS1403
   AS Name: EBOX
   Country Name: Canada
   Country Code: CA
   Time Zone: America/Toronto
   Region: Quebec
   City: Vieux-Saint-Laurent
   Latitude: 45.475
   Longitude: -73.696
- #5: 17.7 ms
   IP Address: 96.127.249.30
   TTL: 248
   AS Number: AS1403
   AS Name: EBOX
   Country Name: Canada
   Country Code: CA
   Time Zone: America/Toronto
   Region: Quebec
   City: Longueuil
   Latitude: 45.518
   Longitude: -73.502
- #6: 18.0 ms
   IP Address: 198.179.18.55
   Hostname: cloudflare.peer.qix.ca
   TTL: 247
   Country Name: Canada
   Country Code: CA
   Time Zone: America/Toronto
   Region: Quebec
   City: Montreal
   Latitude: 45.501
   Longitude: -73.568
- #7: 17.6 ms
   IP Address: 104.16.42.25
   Hostname: api.postmates.com
   TTL: 55
   AS Number: AS13335
   AS Name: CloudFlare
   Country Name: United States
   Country Code: US
   Time Zone: America/Los_Angeles
   Region: California
   City: San Francisco
   Latitude: 37.770
   Longitude: -122.393

Is this still happening?

Thank You
Bob Evans
CTO

It hasn't gone through Europe, it's just most of Telia's IP space will return a geolocation of Europe. The trace provided goes to New York, Chicago then Seattle.

Just because a "fancy" traceroute tool does ARIN, RIPE or APNIC lookups, or
uses a third party geolocation tool such as Maxmind to determine who owns a
given netblock, does not mean that each hop of the traceroute is going
through that country...

It's just saying "this block of IPs is owned by Telia, which is based in
Europe". If you look at the reverse DNS for the route they have used fairly
common abbreviations to denote that this link goes city-to-city within
North America.

Also you would probably notice if your end to end latency from Quebec to
Oregon was taking a round trip through Europe. I bet your RTT ping to the
end point AWS IP in Oregon is low enough that the currently known laws of
physics would prohibit it from taking a round trip through an atlantic
cable and back again.

https://www.google.com/search?q=nanog+traceroute+presentation&oq=nanog+traceroute+presentation&aqs=chrome..69i57.2365j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

That's embarrassing. Thanks for opening my eyes.

Sorry for wasting everyone's time.