: In roughly the order
: 1. Network Engineers (What's this command do?)
: 2. Power failures (What's this switch do?)
: 3. Cable cuts (Backhoes, enough said)
: 4. Hardware failures (What's that smell?)
: 5. Congestion (More Bandwidth! Captain, I'm giving you all she's got!)
: 6. Attacks (malicious, you know who you are)
: 7. Software bugs (Your call is very important to us....)
Very much disagree. Or at least, separate performance and outages.
Outage/Instability:
(Tie for 1st):
1) Shitty software from Major Router Vendors (and everyone else)
1) Misconfiguration
a) Often caused by shitty/easy to fumble CLIs from Major Router Vendors
2) Attacks
3) Power failures
4) Cable cuts
5) (distant)Hardware failure
Performance has been covered; the only real broadband is Universities,
and relatively few transit networks can get to network large and small well.
Avi