BGP

Cisco ThousandEyes tracked between 199 and 386 global network outage events per week during Q1 2026, with a 62% spike during the last week of February that pushed the total to 386 incidents across ISPs, cloud providers, collaboration apps, and edge networks. The data exposes a network landscape that is simultaneously more capable and more fragile than most enterprises realize — and the defining outage pattern of 2026 is not broken components but systems interacting in ways nobody designed for. ...

Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) has declared force majeure on the Persian Gulf segment of Meta’s 2Africa Pearls extension, indefinitely halting work on one of the most critical subsea cable projects connecting the Middle East to global internet infrastructure. The cable-laying vessel Ile De Batz sits stranded off Dammam, Saudi Arabia, unable to complete connections to onshore landing stations — and this is just the beginning of what SP engineers need to worry about. ...

CCIE Service Provider is not a dead track — it’s an undervalued one. Fewer candidates sitting the exam means less competition for high-paying SP roles, while 5G backhaul deployment, Segment Routing adoption, and the stubborn persistence of MPLS in every major network keep demand strong. According to Stratistics MRC, the global 5G network infrastructure market is projected to reach $122.37 billion by 2034 at a 26.9% CAGR — and every one of those networks needs transport engineers who understand the protocols that CCIE SP tests. ...

A Cisco Catalyst 8000V running on a $1/day AWS t3.medium instance gives you a production-grade hybrid cloud lab that connects to your on-prem CML or EVE-NG environment via IPsec VPN with BGP. This is the fastest way for a network engineer to get hands-on with cloud networking using real infrastructure instead of slides and diagrams. Key Takeaway: Building a hybrid cloud lab with AWS VPC and Cisco Catalyst 8000V costs under $2/day, teaches cloud networking fundamentals through a network engineer’s lens, and maps directly to CCIE EI v1.1 blueprint topics — making it the single best investment for bridging traditional and cloud networking skills. ...

Cisco just booked $2.1 billion in AI infrastructure orders from hyperscalers in a single quarter — up from $1.3 billion the quarter before. Their networking product orders surged over 20% year-over-year. If you hold a CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure or you’re studying for one, your skills just became significantly more valuable. The “networking is boring” era is officially dead. Key Takeaway: AI workloads are driving the biggest networking investment cycle in a decade, and the protocols tested on the CCIE EI lab — BGP, VXLAN/EVPN, SD-WAN, QoS — are exactly what hyperscalers and enterprises need to build AI-ready infrastructure. ...

If you’re grinding through OSPF LSA types and BGP path selection at 2 AM, you’ve probably had this thought: “Will I actually use any of this?” You’re not alone. A recent Reddit thread in r/networking went viral when a junior network engineer — actively studying for the CCIE — discovered that senior engineers at his company couldn’t even explain the OSPF templates they’d been deploying for years. The thread exploded with nearly 100 comments, and the consensus was surprisingly honest: most network engineers rarely make L3 routing changes in their day-to-day work. ...

Learn how to implement BGP RPKI Route Origin Validation on Cisco IOS-XE and IOS XR to prevent route hijacks and improve routing security.