CenturyLink/Level 3 Outage: A Botched Response to a DDoS Attack? [telecom]

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By - Ed Targett, Editor

"It may have been that... the significant load that large number of BGP updates imposed on their routers made it difficult for them to login to their own interfaces"

A major CenturyLink/Level 3 outage on Sunday that took down websites across the US and EU has been blamed by the carrier on an "offending flowspec announcement" -- an encoding format typically used to block malicious DDoS attacks.