A technique treats a protected forwarding adjacency (FA) as a dynamic entity in that it allows a backup tunnel associated with the FA to carry traffic for the FA, when it's primary tunnel has failed, up to a predetermined amount of time. If after the predetermined amount of time has elapsed and the FA has not recovered (e.g., the primary tunnel has not been reestablished), a network topology change is automatically triggered causing the network to converge on a new network topology. By triggering the network topology change, a path that is more optimal than the path associated with the backup tunnel may be subsequently determined to carry the traffic.