From the title, I'd guessed that this was about a thing that happened back in the 80s. Somebody misconfigured a routing table so one router was advertising "I can get anywhere in one hop". Once that propagated, just about everything went down as most traffic was enqueued to that "one hop" router.

Fortunately, a fix was possible as tables were propagated out of band (different queues).

I never got the full story. Anybody know? Not holding my breath as the 80s were the Dark Ages if you count in Internet years...