Loops cause another disaster. When frames circle through multiple paths, the same source MAC appears on different ports. Your switch's MAC address table keeps updating, flipping entries back and forth. This is called MAC flapping. The switch cannot learn stable paths, so unicast traffic gets flooded everywhere. Your network performance drops, and troubleshooting becomes a nightmare because nothing stays consistent. STP prevents this by ensuring only one active path exists between any two switches.
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$ curl repovive.com/roadmaps/network-design/spanning-tree-and-link-aggregation/mac-table-instability
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