Circular dependencies definitely are a thing to keep in mind when designing IRR and RPKI pipelines!
In the case of IRR: It is quite rare to query the RIR IRR services directly. Instead, the common practise is that utilities such as bgpq3, peval, and bgpq4 query “IRRd” (
https://IRRd.net) instances at for example
whois.radb.net and
rr.ntt.net. You can verify this with tcpdump. These IRRd instances serve as intermediate caches, and will continue to serve old cached data in case the origin is down. This phenomenon in the global IRR deployment avoids a lot of potential for circular dependencies.
Also, some organisations use threshold checks before deploying new IRR-based filters to reduce risk of “misfiring”.