performance myth: single router can't trash the Internet


(`certainly not by accident')

just one example: microsoft's feb 2001 dns woes 
microsoft's 4 authoritative nameservers visible to world on one subnet 
(and now all you need is a comma in the wrong place)
misconfigured router upstream of that subnet 
TTL for their names set to 2 hours 
started timing out of peoples caches 
query load at the roots started climbing  
microsoft nameservers don't do negative caching

microsoft properties are usually about 6k queries/hour (0%) 
increased to 25% of the load at f-root 

-->  data: prominent site w/DNS problems affects whole Internet 
cf. 9/11 cnn.com queries to roots were sustainable because of caching
this only a tiny piece of the root-server workload damage found