back to article Routing instability causes net traffic chaos

Surfers experienced problems accessing parts of the internet Monday, following the flare-up of router instability problems. Security watchers pinned the problem on "garbage" being thrown into global BGP (Border Gateway Routing) lookup tables, causing entries to become unnecessarily long. Some backbone routers with older …

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  1. Lozzyho
    Paris Hilton

    Is this related to...?

    Is this related to the problem that my ISP says is causing BT IPStream to be slowing to a crawl after 7pm these days (i.e. for the last couple of weeks!)

    They (o2 broadband) say that there's nothing they can do, as they're in BT's hands. Oh shit, methinks. No resolution date, no further information, no update on the web. Great.

    Paris, cos she's always got capacity.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Is this why ...

    ... I have to use an anonymous proxy in the USA to get to www.tfl.gov.uk from my home in the UK? All my ISP (Demon) could tell me after I had performed many traceroutes and adjustments to default DNS etc was 'it isn't in our domain so it's not our problem'.

    Paris because I sometimes wonder if intelligence is over-rated.

  3. fullofit
    Thumb Up

    quick BGP primer

    The SANS ISC daily podcast covers the event today with a quick BGP primer. Let's hope it will be continued in the next episode to shed more of a light into what is happening here. See http://isc.sans.org/podcast.html

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh, that's just delightful...

    "silly long AS paths, and so they blow chunks when they receive the update".

    Lovely. Just lovely!

  5. Nick G
    Coat

    Hmm, I wonder...

    It seems that nobody with Demon could access any part of the lotro-europe website or the Lotro game itself last night or this morning.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: Demon

    I'm on Demon, suffering slow Internet today/yesterday.

    High packet loss to www.demon.net which shouldn't go outside of their network, not bothered with a tracert etc.

    Lucky for me I can get directly to www.tfl.gov.uk fine unlike an earlier poster, the internet still has a purpose for me!

  7. Alex
    Black Helicopters

    by some strange co-incidence

    certain carriers are playing with methods of wiretapping the entire net!

  8. Alan W. Rateliff, II
    Paris Hilton

    Embarq problems yesterday

    Embarq suffered an outage from ~11:15am EST to ~12:54pm EST yesterday as well. It only affected certain data services customers. I am curious if this was related as its short explanation was a loss of BGP connectivity.

    Paris, no loss of connectivity here. Happy 28th.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Very Technical

    "Similar problems caused global routing instability five years ago, McPherson notes in a detailed technical dissection of the problem"

    This would be a technical dissection from a man who explains that routers "blow chunks" and "take a dump"?

    Jolly good.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    <No Title>

    A simple Whois shows the AS number mentioned in the article is registered to

    AS SUPRO-NET

    SUPRO, spol. s r.o.

    ORG-Sssr1-RIPE

    Whoever that may be.

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Lozzyho

    Slow after 7pm? Sounds more like a contention issue than the BGP problem. Far be it from me to cast aspersions, but...

    As I understand it when an ISP buys into IPStream they pay for a certain amount of bandwidth from BT Central to their own network. All their ADSL EUs are sharing that bandwidth, so if they are hitting performance problems at busy times then the most likely cause is that they have run out of bandwidth. The solution? Buy more bandwidth.

    Here's a question for you to ask O2: How many end users are sharing how much bandwidth from the BT cloud? Now imagine they're all using 500kb/s downloading movies, watching iplayer, etc. And see if there's any bandwidht left.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    problem analogy

    Hey look kids, AS 531753, AS 187239.

  13. Wayland Sothcott
    Pirate

    Evilkity.tv

    Essex based Online Underground Music Television station http://evilkitty.tv would suddenly lose it's stream from the SHOUTcast server in the USA. This was happening for an hour or so on Sunday and Monday and a bit yesterday. The ping loss was up to 75% but it seemed to begin playing again when the ping got down to 50% loss.

    Has anyone else noticed this sort of thing with services based in the USA?

    It's not really Pirate because it's licenced music and not played on the FM.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    BGP FAIL

    Wayland.

    This was pretty much a global issue.This even meant's my routing within the same ISP was fucked due to the routers dumping BGP sessions and even possibly rebooting as they couldn't handle the long BGP advert.

    It was these guys who caused it.

    http://www.supro.cz/

    But in the past other ISP have also greated problems similar.

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