Saturday, August 28, 2010

House of Cards


Time flies. Although it was over 18 months ago, it seems just like yesterday that a small Czech provider, SuproNet, caused global Internet mayhem by making a perfectly valid (but extremely long) routing announcement. Since Internet routing is trust-based, within seconds every router in the world saw this announcement and tried to pass it on. Unfortunately, due to the size of this single message, quite a few routers choked - resulting in widespread Internet instability. Today, over a year later, we were treated to a somewhat different version of the exact same story.
First, let's review the Czech incident from February 2009. There were many positives to take away.
  • It was precipitated by an honest mistake.
  • It was an extremely unlikely event, as many stars had to be in exact alignment.
  • Most of the Internet's core survived.
  • The response from operators was fast and efficient, with the damage largely contained within an hour.
The complete technical details can be found here.

No comments:

Post a Comment