Four Net backbone servers hit by glitch

Fri, 25 Aug 2000 12:00:01 GMT Rachel Munro

Computers which manage global Internet traffic shut down last night, reports the Wall Street Journal

Four out of 13 computers that control the flow of Net traffic worldwide partially failed Wednesday night as the result of a technical glitch, reported the Wall Street Journal.

The problem was dealt with quickly, so users remained unaffected. The remaining nine so-called root servers continued to operate normally.

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/2000/33/ns-17502.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 25, 2000

Answers

Root server outage ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------- posted 3:21pm EST Fri Aug 25 2000 NEWS Network Solutions (NSI) reported that four of the 13 Internet DNS root servers stopped responding to requests for .com domains for a period of 35 minutes. The problem was caused by a technical glitch and not an attack. NSI first characterized the incident as "a major, major incident," and later downplayed it as "a non-event."

The Internet is capable of running with only one root server operational, but performance of some operations would be affected by such an outage.

Read more at CNet.

ROB'S OPINION Behind the scenes, to those who understand the importance of the root servers, it was a major incident. To users, it was probably not even noticed. The good news is that even though four servers were affected, 9 others went unaffected. Why that happened was not explained, but I'm betting that the incident was a near disaster, with some DNS Geek at NSI feverishly typing away to stop the errant software upgrade before it shut down ".com" responses for all 13 root servers before the next replication.

From NSI's responses to the incident, this seemed to be a very near disaster that would affect the entire Internet. Then, they downplayed it because it didn't actually affect users. Maybe it's time to think of a better backup plan than "Let's see how fast I can type."

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/q22000/gee2000825002220.htm

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), August 26, 2000.