The core of the problem is the routing table, a map of all the paths through the web that routers use to direct traffic. As the internet grows, so does the routing table, including more and more paths from point to point. The table is now reaching a critical mass of 512K routes, which is enough to overflow the allocated memory for many older routers. Because different regions keep slightly different routing tables, the effect is likely to be spread out over the next few weeks, but when it comes, it may take down a lot of the older hardware powering the web. “We’ll see sporadic, distributed instability,” says Renesys‘s Jim Cowie, who wrote the report, “and we may see quite a lot of it.” – Russell Brandom,The Verge