What happens to traffic during STP convergence when the topology changes?

• A. Traffic may be temporarily rerouted and experience short outages as the network converges to a new loop-free state.
• B. Traffic stops entirely after topology change for all links.
• C. Traffic remains unaffected.
• D. Traffic automatically doubles bandwidth to compensate.

Answer: (A)

STP convergence is the network reconfiguring to a new loop-free path after a topology change. When a link or switch state changes, the spanning tree recalculates and may block or unblock ports to maintain a loop-free diagram. During this reconfiguration, traffic is redirected along alternate paths and some paths may become temporarily unavailable, so you can see short outages or brief pauses until the new loop-free arrangement settles. The disruption is localized to the affected areas and doesn’t imply all traffic stops or that bandwidth magically doubles.