[godelmachine]

Page 7 -

>>CenturyLink and Infinera state that, despite an internal investigation, they do not know how or why the malformed packets were generated.

So we still don’t know why the rotten packets were created in the first place?

[bcaa7f3a8bbc]

I'd bet it's due to a firmware/software bug triggered by a rare condition, or undefined software behavior trigger by a hardware malfunction. If it's true, it means the root cause would probably never be identified as nobody can reproduce it. It's something pretty scary to think about: We can never guarantee most software would work correctly all the time, empirical testing is often the only practical assessment, and probabilistic bugs such as mysterious crashes cannot be discovered.

But I think the bigger problem is not the packets, but why didn't the backbone reject those malformed packets.