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Cisco Routers to Blame for Japan Net Outtage

Posted by Zonk on from the no-web-for-you-mr.-roboto dept.

An anonymous reader passed us a link to a Network World article filling in the details behind the massive internet outage Japanese web users experienced earlier this week. According to the site faulty Cisco routers were to blame for the lapse, which left millions of customers without service from late evening Tuesday until early in the morning on Wednesday. "NTT East and NTT West, both group companies of Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), are in the process of finalizing their decisions on a core router upgrade, according to the report. The routing table rewrite overflowed the routing tables and caused the routers' forwarding process to fail, the CIBC report states."

2 of 78 comments (clear)

  1. Underspec routers by ReidMaynard · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Phrases like

    The routing table rewrite overflowed the routing tables
    and

    router capacity was partly responsible for the failure
    leads me to think this was a problem which was probably reported numerous times to middle management and perpetually postponed.
    --
    -- www.globaltics.net

    Political discussion for a new world

  2. Re:Should have used Junipers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We're a Cisco shop but are seriously looking into Juniper due to some negative service impacting experiences. Juniper, especially M series, look like it was designed very intelligently from the ground up with superior hardware architecture with separation of routing engine/packet forwarding/control plane, much more powerful CLI/config error checking/timed roll-back, wire rate granular filtering, one train of code to follow and so on. Unlike Cisco 6500/7600 Sup720-3B/3BXL with hardware limitation of 256K and 512K IPv4 routes respectively, even Juniper's older M20 platform has been tested with upwards of 1 million routes. As for stability, Juniper is found in the core of most service providers, government, academia and research (Internet2 high speed network http://www.abilene.iu.edu./ I see Juniper as the Unix of routers and Cisco the Windows of routers. If you desire stability, security, performance and flexibility go Juniper. Cisco still has a place such as in enterprises that still run legacy IPX.