Google DNS (8.8.8.8) is down in Europe

Uhmm, it's working fine for me:

Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53

Name: discordapp.com Address: 104.16.58.5 Name: discordapp.com Address: 104.16.59.5

It's down for me too (nodejs.org):

nslookup nodejs.org 8.8.8.8 Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53

server can't find nodejs.org: SERVFAIL

Edit: I'm in Europe, my servers in US work fine

Both of those addresses are Anycast. The clusters you talk to are determined by the ISP you are coming from. It is entirely possible there could be a routing problem, or a problem with a particular datacenter that services your ISP.

A work around would be to use a recursive caching server to forward requests upstream to multiple IP's and let it track which one is down. Unbound DNS is really good for this. You could set forwarders to 1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and it will track which ones are up.

An example configuration in Unbound DNS would look like this:

    forward-zone:
      name: "."
      forward-addr: 1.1.1.1         # CloudFlare
      forward-addr: 1.0.0.1         # CloudFlare
      forward-addr: 8.8.8.8         # Google
      forward-addr: 8.8.4.4         # Google
      forward-addr: 208.67.222.222  # OpenDNS
      forward-first: no

And you can view it's status with unbound-control:

    unbound-control dump_infra | grep 1\.1\.1
    1.1.1.1 . ttl 1745 ping 0 var 71 rtt 284 rto 284 tA 0 tAAAA 0 tother 0 ednsknown 1 edns 0 delay 0 lame dnssec 0 rec 0 A 0 other 0

This method of caching can also slightly improve the privacy of the people using your network. You get the bonus of a local low latency cache, and requests are distributed among multiple destinations, slightly reducing the marketing benefits of running those public DNS servers.