The problem revolved around the BGP protocol that stiches thousands of autonomous systems, or in laymen’s terms, networks, that make up the internet. If one network makes a mistake in announcing new routes, other networks down the line can pass on that mistake. Verizon could have had a limit on the number of prefixes – the term for blocks of IP addresses – that its routers are allowed to accept per BGP session. About 15 percent of Cloudflare’s global traffic was affected during the most severe period.”]