2) The Internet is a network of networks, where each network (called an autonomous system) possesses its own range of IP addresses and operates its own routing protocol. The BGP facilitates the routing between autonomous systems; it is the necessary “glue” to hold the tens of thousands of networks together into a commonly accessible Internet. Despite this key importance, the BGP is surprisingly susceptible
to malfunctions; Internet service impairments and service failures due to the BGP are listed in this category. Most common are BGP hijacking events, where a network announces some IP address space that it actually does not own. As a result, traffic toward a particular network which is the actual user of that IP prefix is temporarily
misdirected. Other previous incidents related to the BGP were hardware- and protocol-based; for example, unusual but valid BGP messages let key routers in the Internet crash due to software bugs, thereby also effectively cutting off networks from the overall Internet.