Causes of Flooding
The very cause of flooding is that destination MAC address of the packet is not in the L2 forwarding table of the switch. In this case the packet will be flooded out of all forwarding ports in its VLAN (except the port it was received on). Below case studies display most common reasons for destination MAC address not being known to the switch.

Cause 1: Asymmetric Routing
Large amounts of flooded traffic might saturate low-bandwidth links causing network performance issues or complete connectivity outage to devices connected across such low-bandwidth links.

Cause 2: Spanning-Tree Protocol Topology Changes
Another common issue caused by flooding is Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP) Topology Change Notification (TCN). TCN is designed to correct forwarding tables after the forwarding topology has changed. This is necessary to avoid a connectivity outage, as after a topology change some destinations previously accessible via particular ports might become accessible via different ports. TCN operates by shortening the forwarding table aging time, such that if the address is not relearned, it will age out and flooding will occur.
TCNs are triggered by a port that is transitioning to or from the forwarding state. After the TCN, even if the particular destination MAC address has aged out, flooding should not happen for long in most cases since the address will be relearned. The issue might arise when TCNs are occurring repeatedly with short intervals. The switches will constantly be fast-aging their forwarding tables so flooding will be nearly constant. Normally, a TCN is rare in a well-configured network. When the port on a switch goes up or down, there is eventually a TCN once the STP state of the port is changing to or from forwarding. When the port is flapping, repetitive TCNs and flooding occurs.

Cause 3: Forwarding Table Overflow
Another possible cause of flooding can be overflow of the switch forwarding table. In this case, new addresses cannot be learned and packets destined to such addresses are flooded until some space becomes available in the forwarding table. New addresses will then be learned. This is possible but rare, since most modern switches have large enough forwarding tables to accommodate MAC addresses for most designs.
Forwarding table exhaustion can also be caused by an attack on the network where one host starts generating frames each sourced with different MAC address. This will tie up all the forwarding table resources. Once the forwarding tables become saturated, other traffic will be flooded because new learning cannot occur. This kind of attack can be detected by examining the switch forwarding table. Most of the MAC addresses will point to the same port or group of ports. Such attacks can be prevented by limiting the number of MAC addresses learned on untrusted ports by using the port security feature.