News reports have been circulating over the past couple of days that various service providers have hit the 512k route mark in their BGP tables on their routers and switches causing outages and other problems. A number of hardware platforms, notably older Cisco hardware, have default limits in their configurations which limit route tables sizes to 512k routes. When these limits are breached the older hardware slows down or otherwise stop functioning as expected. Cisco issued a bulletin in May to providers with workaround procedures for some platforms.
The growth in the global route table has been fairly stable over the past couple of years and this is growth has been expected for a long time and yet still Internet service providers were not prepared in time for this event.
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