Ping and Traceroute outputs are provided for a connectivity issue. What is the cause of these results?

A routing loop occurs when two or more routers forward packets toward each other in a cycle due to inconsistent or missing routing information. Traceroute reveals this as the same set of router addresses repeating across multiple TTL increments, while ping shows persistent timeouts or TTL-exceeded ICMP replies because packets never reach the destination and are eventually discarded.

A high-metric route would still deliver packets to the destination along a less-preferred path - it would not produce non-terminating cyclic hop output in traceroute.

Multiple equal-cost paths result in different next-hop addresses per probe in traceroute, not the same repeating sequence of routers that characterizes a routing loop.