Ask HN: DNS Outage? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: DNS Outage?

67 pointsdgritsko21 comments

There seems to be a pretty widespread DNS-related issue at the moment. Does anyone have insight as to the root cause?

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

Is fidelity outage related to this as well?

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.

It's not just their internal DNS, I was about to order some gear online but the hostname for my bank no longer resolves.

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.

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/

Yeah, I was surprised that there wasn't an HN thread on it yet.

Being covered by independent.co.uk: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/in...

Edit: formatting

Seeing a "Service Unavailable - DNS failure

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

on many sites.

Related thread (that I just opened)[0]. It's affecting the major brokerages.

Will be interesting to see the postmortem on this.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27920592

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/

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.

Ah, good point!

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

According to pingdom about 30k sites affected at the peak.

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.

Probably related - carriers are reporting AS701 BGP issues with Verizon at Equinix NY2 datacenter.

DNS is decentralized, but it seems like Akamai breaking breaks a huge swathe of websites.

Yes but services like Akamai or Cloudflare etc. centralize quite a few things. They go down, DNS being decentralized doesn't matter much.

yup, our workplace covid check-in system is down. :)

Possibly Akamai?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com