BGP
Technology & Computing abbreviation · Networking
| Stands for | Border Gateway Protocol |
|---|---|
| Categories | Technology & Computing |
BGP stands for Border Gateway Protocol, a networking abbreviation.
The routing protocol that holds the internet together, letting autonomous systems such as ISPs, cloud providers and large companies announce which IP prefixes they can reach. Routers choose paths using policies and attributes such as AS path length rather than raw link speed.
Example: A bad BGP update withdrew the company's routes, and its apps vanished from the internet for six hours.
Usage notes
The first version was famously sketched on napkins by Kirk Lougheed and Yakov Rekhter at a 1989 IETF meeting; today's BGP-4 is defined in RFC 4271. BGP runs over TCP port 179. Because routers largely trust what neighbors announce, typos and deliberate hijacks can redirect traffic worldwide, and RPKI route-origin validation is the main defense. Facebook's October 2021 outage began with a backbone configuration change that withdrew its BGP routes.
Related abbreviations
More networking abbreviations
- AP – Access point (wireless)
- ARP – Address Resolution Protocol
- ARPANET – Advanced Research Projects Agency Network
- ASN – Autonomous system number
- ATM – Asynchronous Transfer Mode
- CGNAT – Carrier-grade NAT
- CIDR – Classless Inter-Domain Routing
- CIFS – Common Internet File System
- CNAME – Canonical name (record)
- CRC – Cyclic redundancy check
- CSMA/CD – Carrier-sense multiple access with collision detection
- DDNS – Dynamic DNS