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I am no expert.

But a route leak forces traffic to take a different path, and this potentially results in a pipe being inundated with a significant volume of traffic that cannot be handled by ISPs along that route (or simply a dead-end).

i.e. imagine an ISP in Rio suddenly declaring that they are the best route to reach the networks that contain facebook.com and google.com ... that ISP will DDoS itself or one of their downstream partners. An ISP may not even notice this, but their peers and partners probably will.

A couple of years ago a BGP route leak took out the entire internet for a few hours for people in Australia. They're fairly common unfortunately, but tend to have limited impact and are resolved quite quickly.

More info: https://labs.apnic.net/?p=139



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