We have experienced a significant increase in ICMP traffic, from all corners of the 'Net recently. Today it caused a slowdown and some packet loss on our core switch due to the rapid growth of the forwarding table. We attempted to mitigate this with different switch configurations, but were unable to achieve a proper balance. At 2:30 PM we elected to just block ICMP echo traffic at our boundary router. We realize that this may "break" some monitoring systems, and make some troubleshooting more difficult - but the overall performance of our network is far more critical. We apologize for any inconvenience you may experience.

Should the "worms du jour" that generate this kind of traffic subside, we will enable ICMP echo packets again.