[ih] Large scale BGP failure in early 90's

Craig Partridge craig at tereschau.net
Wed May 28 00:16:21 PDT 2025


Wasn't that the same pattern that took down the AT&T network c. 1990 (a
busted update that was propagated before being fully processed)?

I seem to recall Dave Mills actually triggered a similar issue in the early
Internet (I do recall he talked about some bug in his code and that some
authority figure, Vint?, was mad at him at the time).

Craig

On Tue, May 27, 2025 at 2:32 PM Matt Mathis via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Is there a writeup (or does anybody recall) a large-scale BGP failure in
> the early 90s, when one ventor was testing a feature to make routes less
> preferred (AS prepending or doubling) which caused all gated based BGP
> implementation to lock up?   Unfortunately the processing order was: parse
> the test route, forward test route, and then lockup.  So the test route
> successfully flooded the entire routing system before locking up all of the
> NSFnet and many other networks.
>
> I am looking for a more complete and accurate description of this event.
>
> Thanks,
> --MM--
> Evil is defined by mortals who think they know "The Truth" and use force to
> apply it to others.
> -------------------------------------------
> Matt Mathis  (Email is best)
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