Renesys Analysis of SuproNet Announcement Debacle

Earl Zmijewski of Renesys has an analysis of the SuproNet incident that took down a good bit of the Internet on Monday.  From the blog:

This single Czech provider announcing a single prefix caused a huge increase in the global rate of updates, peaking at 107,780 updates per-second. This peak occurred at 16:30:54 UTC, less than 8 minutes after the first announcement.

At Renesys, we call a prefix impacted in a given hour if either suffers an outage or has a non-trivial amount of instability. In the hour before this event, there were 1215 impacted prefixes globally out of a total of 271,175. During the event, that number surged to 12,920 or 4.8% of all prefixes on earth. One announcement from one provider and we have a 10-fold increase in planetary routing instability for an hour. North America suffered the most, increasing from 0.35% to 4.76%, while South America suffered the least, increasing from 0.52% to 1.75%.

It’s an interesting read and shows another example of just how vulnerable the Internet is as a whole.