Notion is experiencing a DNS issue | Hacker News Reader

Notion is experiencing a DNS issue

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91 pointsibraheemdev61 comments

I can't seem to grasp this, Notion also has notion.com registered, and it resolves perfectly, but is 302 redirecting to notion.so

Why? Was no one from Notion around during the 2010 takedowns of .ly domains?

Apparently that was just the best available notion domain when they first launched, and I guess they never got around to transitioning once they acquired notion.com: https://www.reddit.com/r/Notion/comments/f6x9mk/why_the_so_d...

"we'll be switching to .com as soon as our engineering team has the bandwidth." - 11 months ago

"API access coming soon!" - 3+ years ago

"Offline mode is in the works" - 2+ years ago

I don't trust anything that Notion promises. Changing to .com is probably the simplest of those three, too. I have no idea what their backend looks like but I know I could make that change in 10 minutes on mine.

Cutesy domain names using country TLDs really need to stop - if anything "notion.so" should redirect to dot com.

Exactly, and notion.so doesn't even have unique meaning going for it.

Am I the only one who doesn't get the cute joke behind notion using a .so TLD?

Apparently not. Registries is something most people don't think about until its too late.

[whois updated.]

"Domain Status" updated to "ok"

> Updated Date: 2021-02-12T15:40:39.103Z

> Renewal Grace Expiry Date: 2021-02-17T14:06:47.556Z

> Domain Status: ok https://icann.org/epp#ok

> Registrant Organization: Notion

---

[whois updated.]

"Domain Status: clientHold" has been removed.

> Updated Date: 2021-02-12T15:11:58.579Z

> Renewal Grace Expiry Date: 2021-02-17T14:06:47.556Z

> Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited

> Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited https://icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited

> Registrant Organization: Notion

It looks like some sort of dispute or contractual issue between Notion and and the .so registry, or a complete messup by the registry.

From a whois of notion.so:

Updated Date: 2021-02-12T12:54:35.982Z

Creation Date: 2015-03-31T00:00:00.0Z

Registry Expiry Date: 2021-03-31T00:00:00.0Z

Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2021-03-31T00:00:00.0Z

Domain Status: clientHold https://icann.org/epp#clientHold

I don't understand why they're using the Somalian TLD when they also own .com

How reliable are these other TLDs like emerging country TLDs like .ly (Libya), .co (Colombia) or .so (Somalia)? Could you just get shut down overnight?

Any domain is entirely at the mercy of the registrar, and for country domains that's entirely in the country itself. It's amusing to me that some of the most "desirable" country domains are also coincidentally some of the most unstable countries.

This is not entirely true. For example the .se domain is not controlled by the Swedish government but is administered by The Swedish Internet Foundation which is a private foundation (source I work there..). It is (now) regulated somewhat by law.

Perhaps, but a private foundation in Sweden is subject to the laws thereof - if Sweden wanted to regain complete control there's not much your foundation could do.

Libya has been known to shut down websites they don't like: https://www.neowin.net/news/nicly-down-as-libyas-response-to...

If I understand correctly, the .so TLD is effectively a national resource of Somalia, and as such they have total control over it and could in fact shut it down if they wanted.

> It is an uncommon status that is usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment, or when your domain is subject to deletion.

Serious question, if this is an extended legal dispute or the domain is actually subject to deletion, that would be hugely damaging to the Notion brand right?

I ask because I can't think of another company that's had a similar issue lately, so I find the domain dispute an interesting issue that we rarely see get to this stage.

This should be a good lesson to get a domain on a reliable registry.

I never understood why notion continued to use notion.so when they own notion.com and you don’t have to worry about countries (ccTLD) doing things like this.

I guess it's been somewhere in their backlog with "impact: medium, urgency: low" for ages, so it never got to the top of the list and never got done.

I'm also quite sure it's got updated to "urgency: high" today

@NotionStatus deleted the Tweet asking for their users to put them in contact with someone at name.com.

> Do any users have a contact at http://name.com?

— https://twitter.com/NotionStatus/status/1360231247570554880

They also very briefly tweeted "@namedotcom We sent you a DM, can you please respond with a live support number?"

Seems like they were having trouble contacting a human and had to resort to public shaming, and then deleted it once they got through.

namedotcom: We are working with the owners of this domain to address this issue as quickly as possible.

notionhq: Heya! Could you let us know where you're messaging us to address this?

https://twitter.com/NotionHQ/status/1360238956772642818?s=20

Heh, mailing to <something>@notion.so probably wouldn't be working at the moment.

Notion appears to now be seeking direct help from it’s user base to resolve the issue.

> Do any users have a contact at http://name.com?

— https://twitter.com/NotionStatus/status/1360231247570554880

This sounds like a pretty desperate move

They've now deleted it.

I hate the idea of not being able to access my own companies brains

I think if one were to invest a little time you could implement a service on par with notion using

https://www.getoutline.com/ and https://baserow.io/

As I recall, This is third down-related issue of Notion in 2021.

Notion advertises itself as 'All-in-one Workspace'... But I don't want to leave everything to unstable 'All-in-one Workspace'.

Yeah, absolutely. I really like Notion as a platform, but it’s these exactly concerns that led me to switch to Obsidian as my personal knowledgebase. I’d feel better if Notion had a truly offline client with sync rather than wrapping a web app.

i've just given Obsidian a try as a result of this outage. it's damn beautiful and a lovely way to write Markdown, but I really wish it had database features like Notion, I rely on those so much

Yeah, there also doesn't really seem to be a good way to use it as a shared knowledgebase with teammates.

Looks like its running at 104.18.11.147 if you want to update your hosts file directly as a workaround.

But, definitely slower than normal. My templates may not be working right either. But some access to existing data at least.

Edit: Had to set that for www.notion.so and msgstore.www.notion.so to work I think.

Edit2: More discussion here https://gist.github.com/makesxi/dd6a92b48aa422fa943f1109e529...

I wouldn't be surprised if their internal infrastructure uses the domain to talk between its services and is now blowing up all over the place too.

Use two networks! Internal NS for example.lan and public NS for example.com

You don’t need to use two separate domain names for that. Best practice is to use the external domain internally, and use your internal DNS server to point the records to internal IP addresses. That way you can still get public certs issued to internal services.

I use internal CA for internal services.

Apparently they just let their domain expire

https://twitter.com/kieranmch/status/1360246567463235585

Don't think this is right, you can see from a whois pulled earlier that the expiry date was March 31st: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26113614

They're saying that's not it: https://twitter.com/cjc/status/1360253693073870848?s=20

"Hi there! Flagging that this is not an issue with a lapsed renewal. There is a complaint against Notion that we are resolving directly with the registrar. We’re coming back up now."

This is almost comical in a way, 2 billion USD company chooses to establish in Somalia as its virtual storefront. Not surprised it went wrong.

Looks like its back up now.

You can check their DNS propagation here [1]

[1] - https://www.whatsmydns.net/#NS/notion.so

The status page is down as well: https://status.notion.so/

And that's why you should always use a different domain for your status pages! GitHub does it well, for instance: https://www.githubstatus.com/

I wrote a blog post about this once[1] because I was totally shocked how few people actually use a separate domain for their status page. It's like < 0.5% and I'll never understand why.

1. https://statusgator.com/blog/2020/04/21/your-status-page-des...

>>But you can’t use two completely different DNS providers for your status page and your primary page unless you are using a distinct domain.

You can.

> >>But you can’t use two completely different DNS providers for your status page and your primary page unless you are using a distinct domain.

> You can.

Depends on who's who though. Yes, it can be separate if they were different non-apex (AKA like www.google.com and mail.google.com) domains and apex domains (like google.com) can use at least two (depending on your registry) different DNS servers.

However, by design there is an implication that your apex DNS servers are synchronised (or reasonably so). So for example, one of your provider have malfunctioned and instead of just pulling it offline it answered your requests with an IP address you don't control (let's say 198.51.100.17, which is not a routable address) with a exceedingly long TTL (say a week). If a client-side DNS resolver followed it through the heart, it will not allow anything to reach the intended server, even the functions server for non-apex domains.

Plus, registry issues (there is only one registry in the end) and if they messed up, the website is going down (unless they are prudent) etc.

I smell an ironic business opportunity in the ".status " TLD...

that's really clever... too bad I can't afford a TLD

Have been meaning to try Roam Research, I guess that happens today.

For those not wanting to click to Twitter:

> We're experiencing a DNS issue, causing the site to not resolve for many users. We are actively looking into this issue.

— https://twitter.com/NotionStatus/status/1360220589743480838

Also down: https://status.notion.so/

I haven't been using Notion for too long but have migrated a lot of stuff there. Does this kind of downtime happen often? Seems like offline mode is not high up on their agenda, so maybe I can ask here if there's other applications with similar feature, but offline?

Saving bookmark/homepages, a kanban-style todo-list, general note taking (with math eq + image embed) and possibilities to sync between devices? (Personal use only)

They say the issue is with syncing multiple offline edits. But for solo its overkill. I love all the options is has, and its been good for me for the most part, but I just want a solo mode for myself.

If you aren't using the DB features, maybe https://www.getoutline.com/ works?

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take a look through it!

I actually do use the DB feature. Mostly for well, Todo task (kanban style) and as a remedy to the "Exploding tab" phenomenon (saving pages with #tags to later check rather than have it visible as 100s of tabs).

It's just very nice to have everything at one place. Being able to link/backlink between task, homepages, notes and lists have been really useful to lower my anxiety of forgetting/losing some information/thoughts I write down, later.

> They say the issue is with syncing multiple offline edits.

It's not trivial, but I thought that Notion is now big enough to invest the time here. I've been using OneNote for a long time, and its offline support is great, incl. syncing multiple offline edits using a manual conflict resolution.

At least the 'minimum' field in .so's SOA that dictates resolver's nxdomain caching time is only 1200 seconds (20mins) --

  dnsqr ns notion.so
  2 notion.so:
  80 bytes, 1+0+1+0 records, response, nxdomain
  query: 2 notion.so
  authority: so 1199 SOA d.nic.so hostmaster.nic.so 2021021214 21600 3600 604800 1200

I've got it to (partially) work by editing /etc/hosts to include

104.26.4.98 www.notion.so notion.so msgstore.www.notion.so

It seems that hitting https://www.notion.so/login forwards me correctly to view some of our data, but not much else works

As a temporary workaround, you can modify your /etc/hosts file to access Notion.

On Mac/Linux: 1. sudo nano /etc/hosts 2. Add these 2 lines:

104.18.23.110 notion.so 104.18.23.110 www.notion.so

Don't forget to take these out once the issue is resolved.

Update: The DNS issue responsible for today’s downtime has been resolved. We are continuing to monitor.

https://status.notion.so/

https://status.notion.so/ is working - 'all operational'

Their status page is now loading for me:

https://status.notion.so/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com