A soft notification technique isolates address family application based errors or events occurring within a routing protocol, such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), used to exchange routing information between a router and its peer router over a BGP session operating on a reliable transport. The technique apportions the session into a plurality of logical subsets, each of which is associated with an address family application (AFI/SAFI) module of a BGP protocol executing on the routers. BGP soft notification messaging is employed to allow the router to notify its peer of an isolated error condition or event associated with an AFI/SAFI module. Isolation of the error/event enables restart ("soft reset") of only the associated AFI/SAFI module, thereby obviating the need to reset or terminate the entire BGP session and reliable transport between the router and peer. Notably, soft reset of the module occurs without disrupting services provided by other AFI/SAFI modules of the BGP protocol.