MAI Network Services

On 25 April 1997, one border router began presenting thousands of other networks as if they originated behind AS7007. The disruption exposed an Internet held together not by a central routing authority, but by a chain of local acceptance decisions whose limits had too often remained implicit.

The AS7007 routing incident of 25 April 1997 exposed a basic accountability problem in network infrastructure: an internal route transformation can become a global claim when neighboring networks accept and propagate it. The durable lesson is not that one operator made an old configuration mistake. It is that route exporters, upstream providers and importing peers need evidence that their filters, limits, monitoring and recovery procedures work against the routes their systems actually generate.