Juniper at the root of Internet outage?

Network World - Juniper routers are reportedly behind an Internet outage that affected service providers and Web sites around the globe Monday morning.

The blogosphere was abuzz on reports that a core dump of main memory on Juniper routers knocked off sites worldwide. The core memory dump, which affected routers running Junos 10.2 and 10.3, was caused by a Border Gateway Protocol  (BGP) update bug, according to tweets from affected sites.

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Juniper acknowledged that its edge routers were experiencing a BGP anomaly and that it issued a software fix.

"This morning, Juniper learned of a Border Gateway Protocol edge router issue that affected a small percentage of customers," said Mark Bauhaus, Juniper executive vice president of services, support and operations. "A software fix is available, and weve been working with our customers to immediately deploy the fix."

Juniper did not respond to further questions but its believed all affected customers are back up. The BGP bug caused the routers dump main memory, reboot and rebuild their BGP routing tables, sources said.

Earlier, Level 3 reported outages due to its routers but did not name the router vendor.

"Shortly after 9 am ET today, Level 3's network experienced several outages across North America and Europe relating to some of the routers on our network," the company said. "Our technicians worked quickly to bring systems back online. At this time, all connection issues have been resolved, and we are working hard with our equipment vendors to determine the exact cause of the outage and ensure all systems are stable."

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Many ISPs that peer with Level 3 tweeted on their own issues that may have been caused by Level 3s. And others, like HostVirtual, notified customers through Web site updates.

RIM, whose outage from last month is fresh in customers minds, tweeted to assure users that its network had not failed: "A number of ISPs were affected by a global outage today, but BlackBerry systems are up and running."

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