DNS A and AAA records for Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have been destroyed

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30 points·sturza··8 comments

Um…what’s a “AAA” record? Is that like a AAAA record, but for the elusive ipv5?

I learned that it was 4xA not 3xA years into my career during a job interview. It was a funny revelation because your brain doesn't deal with repetition well and in retrospect is made sense because IPv6 is 4x the size of IPv4.

It’s when a domain doesn’t quite have what it takes for the MLB.

Tangent: why is it four ‘A’s? Why not just “A6”? Is there a technical reason?

what i tell myself is that it's because ipv6 uses 128 bits, vs ipv4 32 bit addresses. so its 4x V4 addresses. Still makes little sense, but at least it's something, heh.

There was an A6 record type (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2874.txt), but it was rejected (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3364.txt) in favor of the original AAAA record type (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1886.txt).

Christian Huitema is listed as an author on both AAAA and A6 RFCs, so maybe they know why the AAAA identifier was originally chosen instead of A6. Unfortunately, Google doesn't provide any "AAAA" hits for their blog at https://huitema.wordpress.com/.

I'm sure this is short caches expiring, and hence the records are gone since they are no longer able to route to their DNS servers.

Really?

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