Excessive traffic can have weird side effects, including what you describe here.
Your story reminds me of the D-Link vs Poul-Henning Kamp episode some years back (https://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/04/13/d-link_time_row_escelates/ as well as searching for the obvious keywords) -- essentially the low-end router manufacturer had shipped product with a hard coded, tiny set of time servers in their product, one of which turned out to be PHK's very own, and his link to the world was flooded. If you have data on the traffic (netflow comes to mind) it might be worth the effort to see if there's a pattern where the traffic originated. It could be down to some common misconfiguration, maybe even too many naive followers of a slightly misguidedly written HOWTO somewhere. - Peter -- Peter N. M. Hansteen, member of the first RFC 1149 implementation team http://bsdly.blogspot.com/ http://www.bsdly.net/ http://www.nuug.no/ "Remember to set the evil bit on all malicious network traffic" delilah spamd[29949]: 85.152.224.147: disconnected after 42673 seconds.
