A switch uses the factory-default storm control configuration.

The factory-default storm control configuration on EX Series switches operates in a purely rate-limiting mode rather than an interface-shutdown mode. When broadcast, multicast, or unknown-unicast traffic on a port exceeds the configured bandwidth-percentage threshold, the default action is simply to police the offending traffic type and silently drop only the packets that exceed that threshold, while all traffic within the allowed rate continues to be forwarded normally and the interface itself remains administratively and operationally up throughout the event. This explains the observed symptom precisely: during the burst of unknown-unicast frames, the switch dropped the excess volume above the configured limit, producing a brief period of packet loss, but as soon as the burst subsided and traffic fell back under the threshold, storm control simply stopped dropping packets and normal forwarding resumed automatically — no administrative shutdown, recovery timer, or manual intervention was ever involved, because the interface was never taken down in the first place. This default drop-only behavior is distinct from the optional interface-shutdown action, which must be explicitly configured if an administrator wants storm control to disable a port outright on violation (as seen in a related scenario requiring the clear ethernet-switching recovery-timeout command). Storm control by default covers broadcast, multicast, and unknown-unicast traffic types together, not multicast alone, and it has no functional relationship to GRES, which governs Routing Engine redundancy rather than Layer 2 traffic policing. Reference topics: Junos Enterprise Switching – Storm Control, Default Drop Behavior Versus Interface Shutdown Action.