![](/static/790fef6/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://lemm.ee/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsh.itjust.works%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F15634034-afae-4426-826f-0ba7e2d1adda.png)
IT tech here, yes, yes it can.
Network infrastructure is both increadibly smart while also being dumb in other ways.
To do an ELI5 answer:
Imagine you have a container of pearls that you need to sort, red, green and blue pearls all need to be dropped into a red, green or blue hole.
The container is being refilled, but slow enough that it only gets a new pearl once you have sorted the previous.
The holes are connected to pipes going to separate buckets.
Everything is fine, but then some adds a new hole that is muticolored and tells you that all pearls should go there.
You tell your friends that you have a faster way to deal with the perls and to send you their pearls.
The new hole also has a pipe, but that is connected to the container that recieves pearls, so every time you drop a pearl into the new hole, it appears in the container again.
So now you have a situation where you not only get your normal ammount of pearls, but everyone else’s pearls and you also get every pearl you send back again.
You are smart and quickly realize that something is wrong and call for your teacher for help, networking gear don’t have that capabillity to understand that it is wrong, it just looks at each pearl and not the big picture.
If we go back to the real world, we have developed tools to deal with this situation, we have protocols line spanning tree which can have switches speak with eachother and figure out if there is a physical loop before sending traffic through it.
There are other tools as well, but they all need to be configured and to be honest, it is easily forgotten or made a low priority since it happens rarely.
It is something that is often implemented after a big outage.
Are you talking about split tunneling?
Because last I heard it was considered bad as it was haibg a hard time deciding what traffic to tunnel and what traffic to not