A scientific experiment led to the collapse of the Internet.

Late last week, scientists from Duke University and the RIPE NCC, the European group responsible for internet resource management, conducted an experiment. During the experiment, the organizers modified routing settings using a special data format.

This resulted in 1% of global internet traffic being misdirected. An hour after the experiment began, complaints from users and providers began pouring in, and the experiment was terminated.

The experiment failed because the scientists made mistakes when setting up the network equipment.

The experiment affected 3,500 blocks of IP addresses from 60 countries, of which 336 blocks belonged to RuNet websites.