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Ask HN: DNS Outage?

67 points by dgritsko ↗ HN
There seems to be a pretty widespread DNS-related issue at the moment. Does anyone have insight as to the root cause?

22 comments

[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 59.2 ms ] thread
jkingsman
I can't speculate on cause, but it certainly is incredibly widespread. Just about every service shows a spike in problem reports: https://downdetector.com/
dgritsko
Yeah, I was surprised that there wasn't an HN thread on it yet.
chrishynes
Seeing a "Service Unavailable - DNS failure

The server is temporarily unable to service your request. Please try again later."

on many sites.

cett
Possibly Akamai?
bpeebles
So far it seems to be an Akamai internal DNS look up problem. That is, it seems if they need to resolve the hostname of the origin to serve a page they front for, it fails but I haven't seen any actual DNS failures on my side or other places, just inside Akamai-served pages saying they failed to resolve with an Akamai reference code.
Aaargh20318
It's not just their internal DNS, I was about to order some gear online but the hostname for my bank no longer resolves.
bpeebles
Ah, I hadn't come across them. My feeling is still a minority of sites use Akamai's DNS for their public-facing names, so probably those sites would be affected that way. Although either way the site is down once the cache expires.
pgl
https://edgedns.status.akamai.com/

We are aware of an emerging issue with the Edge DNS service.

We are actively investigating the issue. If you have questions or are experiencing impact due to this issue, please contact Akamai Technical Support. In the interest of time, we are providing you the most current information available, which is subject to changes, corrections, and updates.

Jul 22, 16:09 UTC

rkhacker
Is fidelity outage related to this as well?
neogodless
https://downdetector.com/

Confirmed failing for me: ups.com steam.com steamcommunity.com homedepot.com newegg.com

Still working amazon.com americanexpress.com vanguard.com

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(comment deleted)
elric
DNS is decentralized, but it seems like Akamai breaking breaks a huge swathe of websites.
codegeek
Yes but services like Akamai or Cloudflare etc. centralize quite a few things. They go down, DNS being decentralized doesn't matter much.
dialtone
anyone using akamai as a CDN is having issues, if they use it also as a DNS they won't even resolve their primary domains.
monkaiju
For anyone trying to quantify the impact of this on their setup, check out dug! Its an opensource global dns propagation check on your cli!

https://dug.unfrl.com/

jkingsman
This appears to be an internal DNS lookup failure; the domain itself resolves but Akamai's internal network falls over. If this is the case, a DNS propagation check will not indicate any issues.
unemphysbro
yup, our workplace covid check-in system is down. :)
schemathings
Probably related - carriers are reporting AS701 BGP issues with Verizon at Equinix NY2 datacenter.
mkranjec
According to pingdom about 30k sites affected at the peak.