Cisco BGP Router Issues Caused Massive Outages

On August 12th 2014, several major internet providers and hosting companies were reporting massive outages and network routing issues. At first there was very little information concerning the outage ( Redit thread), but as more information came to light, it turns out it was because of misconfigured Cisco routers (essentially not enough memory).

What is really disconcerting is that this exact issue has been known within the networking community for a while now and in fact PSA had a post describing back in May (Article). In the article, Jeremy even points to a North American Network Operators mailist, where a person named Drew, warns of the exact issue. His comment best sums up the failure of the community to act:”Just something to think about before it becomes a story the community talks about for the next decade.”

Well, maybe not the next decade, but certainly a few months. I think there should have been some warning that was sent out at maybe the Federal level, that communicated this need to update, since it affected so many commercial enterprises in the US.