Our company had 4 class c's of IP addresses delegated to us hijacked the other day. Bell Canada started broadcasting them. Those IP addresses happened to belong to Level3, however. Bell Canada took 5 hours to finally figure out how to stop broadcasting them. I was dumbfounded to learn how easy this is to do. Companies can simply start taking over your traffic at any time by broadcasting a more narrow block of your IPs than you are.
Is this common? People here were scrambling like crazy to find workarounds for our customers. Level3 was telling us that Sprint, among other companies, were about to block traffic from Bell Canada. Is there anything hosting companies can do to prevent downtime? I know we're giving customers additional IP addresses very far apart from what they currently have. But it's sometimes difficult, especially with certain applications, to simply switch to other IP addresses all of a sudden.
