  The contemporary society has become more dependent on telecommunication
networks. Novel services and technologies supported by such networks, such as
cloud computing or e-Health, hold a vital role in modern day living.
Large-scale failures are prone to occur, thus being a constant threat to
business organizations and individuals. To the best of our knowledge, there are
no publicly available reports regarding failure propagation in core transport
networks. Furthermore, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is becoming more
prevalent in our society and we can envision more SDN-controlled Backbone
Transport Networks (BTNs) in the future. For this reason, we investigate the
main motivations that could lead to epidemic-like failures in BTNs and SDNTNs.
To do so, we enlist the expertise of several research groups with significant
background in epidemics, network resiliency, and security. In addition, we
consider the experiences of three network providers. Our results illustrate
that Dynamic Transport Networks (DTNs) are prone to epidemic-like failures.
Moreover, we propose different situations in which a failure can propagate in
SDNTNs. We believe that the key findings will aid network engineers and the
scientific community to predict this type of disastrous failure scenario and
plan adequate survivability strategies.
