Having trouble bringing up your favorite site recently? Don't worry it's not just you - the internet is beginning to fold under its own weight. That weight is unofficially called 512k day and is an event that started on August 12, 2014. Multiple Internet routers, manufactured by Cisco and other vendors, encountered a default software limit of 512K (524,288) IPv4 BGP routing table entries, causing assorted outages at various data centers.

As part of the outage, punters experienced patchy – or even no – internet connectivity and lost access to all sorts of cloud-based services. The LastPass outage is being blamed by many on 512K Day, though official confirmation of this is still pending. The Register has been tracking reports of inability to access cloud services such as Office365 through to more localized phenomena from around the world, many of which look very much like they are 512K Day related.



512KDay is simply "yet another arbitrary limit issue" that has been for years filed away alongside the famous Y2K, IPv4 or 2038 problems. If you're interested in some of the others, Wikipedia has a brief overview of these "time formatting and storage bugs" that explains the big ones, but doesn't have a listing for all the known ones.

Source: The Register