Level 3 Global Outage

Re:Level 3 Global Outage by twic on Sunday August 30, 2020 @01:58PM (#24324572)

This reminds me of an incident on the early internet (perhaps ARPANET at that point) where a routing table got corrupted so it had a negative-length route which routers then propagated to each other, even after the original corrupt router was rebooted. As with AT&T, they had to reboot all the routers at once to get rid of the corruption.

I can't remember where i read about this, but i recall the problem was called "The Creeping Crud from California". Sadly, this phrase apparently does not appear anywhere on the internet. Did i imagine this?

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Re:Level 3 Global Outage by ficklepickle on Sunday August 30, 2020 @02:57PM (#24325012)

I can't find anything by that name either, but the details do match the major ARPANET outage of Oct 27, 1980.

The incident is detailed in RFC 789:

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc789.html#b

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Re:Level 3 Global Outage by twic on Sunday August 30, 2020 @07:29PM (#24326913)

Interesting, thanks! That is different to the story i remember, but it's possible that i remember incorrectly, or read an incorrect explanation.

I believe that i read about this episode in Hans Moravec's book 'Mind Children'. I can see in Google Books that chapter 5 is on 'Wildlife', and there is a section 'Spontaneous Generation', which promises to talk about a "software parasite" which emerged naturally in the ARPAnet - but of which the bulk is not available:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=56mb7XuSx3QC&lpg=PA133&d...

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