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Comment by fweimer | Hacker News Reader

It's been pointed out that these servers still respond over TCP: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/114089755401568345 https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2025-Mar...

Given that the service is still partially operational (albeit not in a useful way), it's difficult to say from the outside what is going on.

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This is for sure a firewall misconfiguration. If there would be malicious intent, the bad actor would for sure not just close UDP.

Can confirm.

Thanks for pointing this out. This makes it much more likely that someone messed up a server/firewall configuration than that Musk is ripping out network cables at NIH.

OTOH it's possible this is the easiest way to disrupt a site - screw with the DNS

So we are looking at reckless incompetence, and not malice? Sorry, but at this point, prove it.

Biden was sleepy though!

Pubmed is one of the most reliable services in the history of the internet. Sure the exact issue is opaque, but the fish rots from the head.

I’m a little late to this thread; but is PubMed really one of the most reliable services in the history of the internet?

I worked on the underlying infrastructure that powers PubMed in the 2010’s at the National Library of Medicine.

I was all up in that thing converting legacy pneumatic Johnson Control systems to Siemens PXC’s, and didn’t actually realize its historical importance online. That’s pretty cool to see this comment.

We had full access to the Datacenter at the National Library of Medicine, and as a young apprentice I really had no idea what PubMed was at the time lol.

I only realized how important of a system it might be when we saw the realtime traffic analytics on the screens outside of the data hall.

Pubmed is running. (Thankfully as it is one of the building blocks of science)

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