Google DNS is currently down

9 points by agotterer ↗ HN
Google DNS appears to be having problems and has been going up and down for the last hour. So if you rely on 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 it could be the cause of some problems for you today.

7 comments

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Some good alternatives are openDNS - 208.67.222.222 or 4.2.2.2
keep in mind openDNS does nasty things like replacing NXDOMAIN replies with adservers, which breaks tons of things.
If you have an account with opendns you can turn that off, as well as do some nicer things like block adware and others (it won't stop the most determined of users but it works).

Without an account opendns is no better than all the shady things many ISPs do nowadays so Google DNS and Level3 or running your own are the better options.

4.2.2.[1-4] is not openDNS, it's Level3's anycasted DNS (and is not officially open to the public)
They also have DNSCrypt, the only encrypted client solution I've found.
GDNS has always been problematic. I monitor it from a variety of locations and its often slow and doesn't propagate changes properly sometimes. I also monitor ODNS and its ok, but not tons better. Fortunately ODNS actually pays attention to customer support issues (unlike Google) so they're likely to fix any problems.

L3 DNS (4.2.2.2) is pretty much on the ball all the time, and has been like that for over a decade so I think its probably the way to go if you're not going to use your ISP provided DNS servers.

Frankly the lowest latency will usually come from your ISP provided DNS servers, so using a 3rd party is really not all that useful...