AS 7007 incident

The AS 7007 incident was a catastrophic routing failure on April 25, 1997, when a misconfigured router at a small Florida ISP (advertising itself as autonomous system 7007) began announcing incorrect routes to large portions of the Internet. The erroneous routes propagated through the global BGP routing infrastructure, causing traffic from major networks to be diverted or blackholed, effectively partitioning the Internet for approximately ninety minutes. The incident demonstrated that the Internet's distributed routing architecture — usually praised for its resilience — could be hijacked by a single misconfigured node, revealing the fragility of trust-based routing protocols that assume all participants are correctly configured. It remains the canonical case study in the trade-off between distributed autonomy and collective vulnerability: the same routing protocol architecture that makes the Internet robust against physical damage makes it vulnerable to configuration errors, because the protocol has no mechanism to distinguish a legitimate route update from a malicious or erroneous one.