AT&T's Facebook traffic briefly routed through China ISP

For a brief period on Tuesday, AT&T customers' Facebook data was temporarily routed through Chinese and Korean ISPs, according to a security researcher.

Barrett Lyon said that due to a routing error, traffic passing between AT&T customers and Facebook went through hardware owned by China Telecom, a state-owned company, and then hardware from South Korean ISP SK Broadband, before going through to Facebook.

When asked for a comment on the matter, Facebook issued a statement confirming that traffic had been routed incorrectly.

"We are investigating a situation today that resulted in a small amount of a single carrier's traffic to Facebook being misdirected. We are working with the carrier to determine the cause of this error," Facebook told ZDNet UK on Wednesday."Our initial checks of the latency of the requests indicate that no traffic passed through China."

In April 2010 internet traffic from the UK, US, Australia and South Korea was redirected through China Telecom, when hardware owned by the ISP advertised itself as the best route for data packets being sent from and to destinations, according to security company McAfee.

ZDNet UK contacted AT&T for comment, but had not received a reply at the time of writing.