Network Solutions DNS Outage

A Network Solutions DNS outage has just brought down many websites across the United States. Problems were were first reported at 9:29 AM PT / 12:29 PM ET today (October 22, 2013) at http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/networksolutions.com.html#morecomments

DNS, which stands for Domain Name System is the mechanism that assigns websites (names) to IP address (numbers). The distributed system of computers (name resolvers) is what makes the Internet work, so when you type google.com in your web browser, your computer knows where to find and load that website. Every website has an authoritative name server, which has the final say over how users find a website.  When an authoritative name server goes down, websites will become inaccessible.

Network Solutions is an authoritative DNS provider that provides web registration services for millions of websites. It is unclear how many, and what are the largest websites to be affected by this DNS outage. eCoustics.com was down for about two hours (12:30 PM ET to 2:30 PM ET), but our DNS appears to be resolving fine since them.  Other customers are still reporting outages throughout the day, while others have recovered.

Service Update: We’ve experienced an incident on Network Solutions DNS, and we’re in the process of restoring services. Thx 4 your patience.

At 8:39 PM ET Network Solutions posted another twitter update:

Service Update: Customers may experience intermittent slowness, as full restoration occurs. We regret the inconvenience. TY 4 your patience.

The cause of the outage unclear, although a customer posted at isitdownrightnow saying a Network Solutions service representative blamed in on internal servers, not a DDOS Attack. As we learn more, I will update this post.