eBay was among a number of top Web sites that crashed yesterday, costing the global economy millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The crash comes as a result of overflowing numbers of Internet protocol version 4 (IPv4) addresses. Web sites such as Amazon, Autotrader and LinkedIn were also affected in the UK.
It appears that yesterday’s outage was caused by a problem with older routers and their inability to deal with the ever increasing size of the Internet’s routing table.
Today, many border gateway protocol (BGP) routers need to store a map of the Internet defining which IP address range belongs to which network. Due to the increasing scarcity of IPv4 space, registrars and ISPs assign smaller and smaller netblocks to customers, leading to a more and more fragmented topology.
Many older routers are limited to store 512k entries, and the Internet’s routing table has become large enough to reach this limit.
IPv4 is the fourth version in the development of the Internet protocol (IP) Internet, and routes most traffic on the Internet. However, a phenomenon known as “address exhaustion” has seen a depletion of the pool of unallocated IP addresses.
Today, IPv4 provides approximately 4,3-billion addresses around the world, but with the unprecedented proliferation of Internet connected devices involved in the mobile revolution and the Internet of Things (IoT), the number of addresses is growing rapidly.
Older routers are finding it difficult to manage with newer technology, such as smartphones and tablets, which have drastically increased the number of people online – and the time spent online.
Businesses and users have been urged to transition to the newer IPv6, but this has not happened fast enough to prevent outages.