CenturyLink Took Down 3.5% of the Internet Trying to Block a Single IP Address [telecom]

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By Ed Targett

"The Operations Engineering Team was using this process during routine operations..."

When CenturyLink, one of the world's biggest internet backbone providers, faced a mystery issue on August 31 at 10:04 GMT, it proceeded to take down 3.5% of the world's traffic, triggering outages at some of the world's most popular websites including the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live. The event wasn't fully cleared until 15:10 GMT.