1. Introduction

1. Introduction

It can be troublesome for an operator to correlate a BGP-4 [RFC4271] session teardown in the network with a notice that was transmitted via offline methods such as email or telephone calls. This document updates [RFC4486] by specifying a mechanism to transmit a short freeform UTF-8 [RFC3629] message as part of a Cease NOTIFICATION message [RFC4271] to inform the peer why the BGP session is being shutdown or reset.