Tuesday 12th August, 2014, has been marked as “512KDay”, the day the global Internet broke under its own weight. The Internet has been growing at a vast rate and 512K routes have always been noted as a significant number of routes on the routing table. On Tuesday 12th August, 2014, the 512K mark was passed.
Why 512K? 512K (or to be exact 524,288 or 2-to-the-19th power), is the maximum number of routes supported by the default TCAM configuration on certain aging hardware platforms. TCAM (Tertiary Content Addressable Memory) is where the routing tables are stored. On the 12th as the total number of routes passed 512K, the devices could not hold all of the necessary routes in memory and thus crashed.