performance myth: power of strategic router 

myth:
single router can't trash the Internet (`certainly not by accident')
(hint: just need to trash 13 hosts to effectively trash the Internet)
data (just one example):
microsoft's feb 2001 dns woes 
microsoft's 4 authoritative nameservers visible to world on one subnet 
               (and now all you need is a comma in the wrong place)
misconfigured router upstream of that subnet 
TTL for their names set to 2 hours started timing out of peoples caches
query load at the roots started climbing
microsoft nameservers don't do negative caching
microsoft properties are usually about 6k queries/hour (0%) increased 
                to 25% of the load at f-root 

lesson:
prominent site w/DNS problems affects whole Internet 
cf. 9/11 cnn.com queries to roots were sustainable because of caching 
this only a tiny piece of the root server workload damage found