Fergie's Tech Blog

Reckless Driving on the Internet

Earl Zmijewski writes on The Renesys Blog:

This weekend, John Markoff wrote an interesting piece for the New York Times entitled Do We Need a New Internet? While his emphasis was largely on security, or rather the lack there of, the central point Markoff makes is that the Internet may be so hopelessly broken that it could be better to start over, rather than continue to apply band-aids.

As if to emphasize this point, SuproNet, a local Czech provider, single-handedly caused a global Internet meltdown for upwards of an hour today. SuproNet accomplished this feat by sending out a rather unusual routing update, one which a lot of routers did not handle very well. The result was Internet bedlam.

More here.

Note: Danny McPherson has some additional information over on the Arbor Networks Blog. -ferg

posted by Fergie @ 2/16/2009 08:27:00 PM