Telekom Malaysia (AS4788) accidentally announced roughly 179,000 BGP routes to Level 3, which accepted and propagated them.
How it spread
Traffic for large parts of the internet was pulled toward Malaysia, and for about two hours users saw global packet loss and slowdowns, felt most acutely in Australia and New Zealand. eBay, Yahoo Mail, PlayStation Network, and Xbox Live degraded together as the bad routes spread.
One mis-announced route table, accepted by a large transit provider, becomes a global slowdown in minutes.