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

[Vint Cerf]

there was a Mother's Day meltdown at AT&T - that might be what you remember.
As to a Mills bug, you might be thinking of the early NSF Fuzzball backbone
that was only 50 Kb/s and instantly congested.
The next version, built by MERIT, IBM and MCI ran on 1.5 Mb/s optical fiber
or wireline using IBM routers (RS series machines??)

I will check with Hans-Werner Braun.

v


On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 3:16 AM Craig Partridge via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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--
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> to
> > apply it to others.
> > -------------------------------------------
> > Matt Mathis  (Email is best)
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