Chapter 2 Advanced Routing for FortiOS 5.0 : Intermediate System to Intermediate System Protocol (IS-IS) : Troubleshooting IS-IS : Routing loops
  
Routing loops
Normally in routing, a path between two addresses is chosen and traffic is routed along that path from one address to the other. When there is a routing loop, that normal path doubles back on itself creating a loop. When there are loops, the network has problems.
A routing loop happens when a normally functioning network has an outage, and one or more routers are offline. When packets encounter this, an alternate route is attempted to maneuver around the outage. During this phase it is possible for a route to be attempted that involves going back a hop, and trying a different hop forward. If that hop forward is blocked by the outage as well, a hop back and possibly the original hop forward may be selected. You can see if this continues, how it can consume not only network bandwidth but also many resources on those routers affected. The worst part is this situation will continue until the network administrator changes the router settings, or the downed routers come back online.