UltraDNS Outage

Image via Wikipedia

This morning,  Dynect Platform monitoring system noticed a problem, a big one. From our global perspective, it appears that many online services, including amazon.com (the store, AWS, and S3), salesforce.com, advertisting.com, and petco.com, had some serious DNS troubles.

As many of our readers know, DNS is the glue that binds domain names, like dynect.com to their respective server’s IP addresses (204.13.248.122). Without DNS, nothing works; no web, e-mail, voip, IM, file sharing, etc.

The Dynect Team quickly began to analyze the situation by checking the resolution chains for these popular web sites. Our analysis revealed that multiple UltraDNS PDNS (a special class of ultradns server) nodes were failing to respond to all DNS queries.

Amazon.com clearly knew about the problem, as our monitoring then detected a change in the delegation for amazon.com from UltraDNS’ PDNS nodes to their UDNS nodes at approximately 8:50 am Eastern.

analysis by checking our global performance trending system – some graphs showing the problems are below.