This reminds me of an incident on the early internet (perhaps ARPANET at that point) where a routing table got corrupted so it had a negative-length route which routers then propagated to each other, even after the original corrupt router was rebooted. As with AT&T, they had to reboot all the routers at once to get rid of the corruption.

I can't remember where i read about this, but i recall the problem was called "The Creeping Crud from California". Sadly, this phrase apparently does not appear anywhere on the internet. Did i imagine this?