This counter tracks associations that transitioned to CLOSED from any state via the ABORT primitive, an ungraceful termination. Unlike ceSctpShutdowns, which counts graceful teardowns, a climbing abort count means associations are dying abnormally, which on a voice signaling link typically shows up as dropped calls or lost SS7 routing until the association can re-establish. ceSctpAborted jumping by 15 in an hour with no matching rise in ceSctpShutdowns points to something forcibly killing associations, such as a peer reset or a protocol violation, rather than planned maintenance.