This morning at 10:37 Pacific Standard Time, one of our network peers experienced an unusual event on their network. They related to us the following information: "A router in Salt Lake City dropped its routing tables, which caused a router in Chicago to lose several BGP sessions."

The event was felt here on our network as a sudden loss of traffic going out in their direction. It lasted about five minutes, as things returned to normal by 10:47 AM. The traffic appeared to shift to our other connections as they increased proportionally as the one decreased. Some clients may have noticed this in the form of resets on persistent connections such as VPNs. It was likely invisible to the average "web surfer" however.

We are still awaiting an official explanation from the NOC of the provider in question, but we felt it important to state what we know now so that you are aware. When we here more, we'll update this post.