Flawed Netgear Routers Overwhelmed UW-Madison Time Server in 2003

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In 2003, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's internet time server was flooded with excessive traffic caused by buggy Netgear routers. The routers contained a firmware flaw that caused them to repeatedly query UW-Madison's NTP time server at abnormally high rates. This design defect meant that as more affected routers were deployed, the volume of requests to the server grew unmanageable. The incident highlighted how a widespread consumer hardware bug could inadvertently overwhelm a public internet infrastructure resource. Details of the problem were documented by UW-Madison researcher David Plonka on the university's computer sciences website.

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