The number of global BGP routing entries is expected to soon exceed 786,000. Smaller ISPs, data centers, and other providers may experience internet outages as we reach this milestone.
The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is one of the fundamental routing protocols responsible for connecting various global traffic routes on the internet, which connect two or more ISPs. Most end users don’t know about BGPs, but ISPs and data centers should be cautious going forward. This is because BGP is about to reach a milestone 786,000 entries.
SponsoredBack in 2014, a similar problem emerged with ‘512k Day’ when the Ipv4 internet routing table exceeded 512,000 entries for the first time. Older routers suffered memory overflows at the time which led to CPUs crashing, and significant losses and traffic drops were recorded worldwide.
Although efforts were made then to prevent this from occurring in the future, smaller ISPs and data centers are now at risk for a new wave of the same problem which is set to occur sometime this month.
Outages Expected for 768k Day
Although most of our internet infrastructure is not at risk, much of the fabric of the internet is propped up by smaller ISPs. These are most at risk with us reaching the benchmark of 786,000 BGP entries.
Much of the traffic comes from these ‘soft spots’ in our internet infrastructure. These legacy routers and network equipment are easily overlooked, which puts them at significant risk for ‘768k day.’
To prepare for potential disruptions, it would be a good idea to conduct maintenance on any routers that receive full internet routes.
SponsoredHow to Prevent Outages in the Future
Our first line of defense against preventing these problems from reocurring years from now is to clean up older, legacy routers and services.
However, there’s a second, more theoretical question we should ask: Is there any way we can better ensure that such complicated maintenance is not required every time we reach a milestone to BGP entries? The answer to that question is a bit more complicated.
Various authors and developers have made the case for the ‘decentralization’ of BGPs. Ethereum Name Service, for example, can work to make DNS systems more efficient with blockchain-based protocols. Similarly, IPFS proposes a peer-to-peer distributed protocol to replace slow HTTP transport. These are just a few of the ideas being proposed by forward-thinking developers.
Regional Internet Registries, along with BGPs, have fulfilled their important role as coordinators of the global internet. However, there’s no reason to not believe that these same checkpoints could be better administered using smart contracts in the future.
Utilizing decentralized blockchain-based networks, DNS mapping, and ASN, IP addresses could be more easily authenticated. The end result would be a much more secure network overall. This would go a long way towards preventing future outages and keeping our global internet systems organically up-to-date.
Although such proposals are far-off from being implemented on a grand scale, ‘786K Day’ should make us pause and consider the limitations of our current internet infrastructure.
How consequential do you expect ‘786k Day’ to be? Do you believe a decentralized model could prevent this from happening again? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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