An administrator configures a policy route that forces all traffic from the back-office billing subnet out through a specific WAN interface and gateway, but that WAN interface is currently down. What happens to traffic matching the policy route while the interface is down?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
A policy route is a set of forced directions, not a magic teleporter — if the road it points to is closed, traffic still can't get through. Matching traffic doesn't quietly reroute itself; it just fails until the interface comes back or the policy route is fixed.
Full Explanation
Policy routes override the standard routing-table lookup for matching traffic, but they do not eliminate the basic requirement that the specified outgoing interface and gateway actually be up and reachable; forcing traffic toward a down interface simply causes that traffic to fail, since there is no automatic fallback built into a policy route by default. This distinguishes policy routes from priority-based static route failover, which is specifically designed to hand off to a backup route when the primary becomes unreachable — a plain policy route has no equivalent built-in backup behavior unless the administrator explicitly designs one. FortiOS does not silently ignore a configured policy route and fall back to normal routing-table behavior for matching traffic; the policy route's whole purpose is to take precedence, so the fallback the first option describes does not happen automatically. It also does not rewrite the policy route's target interface on its own, since that would require design logic the feature doesn't provide. Firewall policies are a separate mechanism entirely and are not disabled by a routing failure. A practical check is to bring the WAN interface back up, or add an appropriate failure condition to the policy route design, and confirm billing-subnet traffic resumes rather than assuming it will reroute on its own.