As the fine article explains, your concerns are addressed by RFC 7606. It recommends that in many cases, an error should be treated as a route withdrawal, not b

As the fine article explains, your concerns are addressed by RFC 7606. It recommends that in many cases, an error should be treated as a route withdrawal, not by dropping the session. (The RFC specifies other ways to handle errors in specific situations.) There’s no guessing or assuming. In the scenario that started off the author’s investigation, the bad attribute kicked COLT off the Internet even though COLT did not connect directly to the Brazilian ISP that sent the bad route update. When they received the bad update, COLT’s routers dropped their BGP sessions with intermediate ISPs that were unrelated to the Brazilian ISP, causing complete loss of connectivity. If COLT’s routers had treated the error as a route withdrawal, they would have lost connectivity to the Brazilian ISP but not the rest of the Internet.