Temporary loss of Internet conectivity in several countries

[capi]

It seems an experimental feature being tested by RIPE in their BGP announcements yesterday at around 9 am UTC caused several Internet Service Providers -- mostly in Europe -- to lose connection with their peers, temporarily cutting off or disrupting Internet connectivity in several countries.

The problem may have been caused by a faulty BGP implementation in some core routers, which corrupted the new attribute before propagating it to their peers and/or reacted to what they perceived as an invalid BGP attribute by resetting the peering session.

A few more details here: http://seclists.org/nanog/2010/Aug/774

Cisco Security Advisory cisco-sa-20090818-bgp describes a situation similar to what may have occurred: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/products_security_advisory09186a0080af150f.shtml

[alt.don]

Very interesting Capi. Thanks for the link.