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Spanning Tree Protocol

Medium

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Why Ethernet loops are catastrophic

Ethernet has no TTL at Layer 2. A broadcast frame in a loop circulates forever, and each switch replicates it on all ports — creating a broadcast storm that saturates all links and crashes every switch in seconds.

STP prevents this by selectively blocking ports to create a loop-free tree topology while maintaining path redundancy for failover.

Packets in motion — click to inspect:

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