Earlier this evening/morning OpenDNS suffered a huge DDoS (distributed denial of service attack). They had to pull down there website because of emergency maintenance. OpenDNS also suffered from mild DNS outages (due to a router not responding). The issue overall is minor.
No threats to end users where ever seen, just outages. Some twitter Users fled to Google DNS during the outage.
“Starting at 10:15 PM PDT tonight all of our global locations suffered a significant denial of service attack. All sites withstood the attack with the exception of Palo Alto, which had sporadic reachability issues lasting for almost 30 minutes. This interruption took our engineers longer to diagnose than it normally would have due to some difficulty removing some routing advertisements between our routers and one of our ISPs. We’re still investigating the cause of this routing anomaly. By 10:45 PM PDT, all DNS traffic was routed to alternate locations, including Los Angeles and Seattle, which were online serving traffic the entire time.”
I don’t think users “fled” to Google DNS. It was a localized outage on the west coast during a large DDoS. And it was for a very very short period of time (minutes, not hours) and was our first in 4 years. And as with any interruption of service, we will investigate and take whatever steps necessary to ensure it doesn’t impact us this way again.
We are always being DDoS’d, it’s a part of life on the Internet, we even get big ones. Something caused a router in Palo Alto to stop listening to our commands and so it didn’t withdraw the routing announcements we had there. That’s what caused the prolonged issue on the west coast. Once we rebooted the router, all was back to normal..
Twitter users where fleeing to Google DNS, but only out of necessity. Updated article.
Wow! You got the Founder/CEO of OpenDNS to comment on your site.
You’re in the big leagues now!
I can sing the praises of OpenDNS and wish I could get my organization to switch. Fortunately, I’ve managed to get our massive malware infections under wraps with deployed updates otherwise I’d still have more leverage to get us to move over.
Yes its a good thing to see him here
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I’ve tried to get OpenDNS at my pubic library, and school but I never get a response.
Ack, thats not good….how the heck did that get through as it was?
I’m glad it was over within the half hour, but…..wow. :
“Some twitter Users fled to Google DNS during the outage.”
That is really not accurate. The number of people who switched were minimal, and this is OpenDNS’ first minute of downtime…
It’s not it’s first downtime just a “major” one. 90% of the people tweeting about the downtime where saying they where using Google DNS because OpenDNS crashed.