Cascading Failures Could Crash the Global Internet

Sun Feb 9 04:36:15 UTC 2003

--- "Stewart, William C (Bill), SALES"
<billstewart at att.com> wrote:

> If what's failing is an overload of BGP routes or
> something,
> that's different - and sometimes the load on the
> system shrinks
> as components fail, but sometimes that just makes
> everything 
> flap all at once, increasing load and delaying
> convergence.

I seem to recall a massive routing failure in October
which was caused by BGP getting imported to a major
ISPs IGP...

The core ${VENDOR 1}routers were able to handle the
influx of routes, but the edge ${VENDOR 2} routers
could not handle the influx - so the failure didn't
exactly cascade, but did more of a ripple.  However,
the reloading of all of the edge devices increased the
BGP instability.

-David Barak 
-fully RFC 1925 compliant-

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