Data shows that as much as one-third of the world can't reach portions of the Internet at a time due to routing problems, Gersch said.

In February, a routing mistake caused the international traffic for Australian operator Telstra to go through its competitor's network, Dodo, which couldn't handle the traffic surge. In a well-known incident, Pakistan Telecom made an error with BGP after Pakistan's government ordered in 2008 that ISPs block YouTube, which ended up knocking Google's service offline.

In March 2011, a that traffic destined for Facebook on AT&T's network strangely went through China for a while. While the requests would normally go directly to Facebook's network provider, the traffic first went through China Telecom and then to SK Broadband in South Korea before routing to Facebook. Although the incident was characterized as a mistake, it would have been possible for unencrypted Facebook traffic to have been spied on.

"The broader problem here is that much of this critical infrastructure simply relies on players behaving correctly," said Dan Massey, an associate computer science professor at Colorado State University. "In a truly global system like the internet, you must assume that organizations will occasionally make unintentional mistakes."

But "imagine what a determined adversary might be able to do," Massey said. That could include attacks on critical infrastructure, such as power plants, which have become increasingly reliant on the Internet.