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Google DNS Glitch Caused Outage

An anonymous reader writes "Google suffered a pretty long outage saturday evening, due to some DNS glitches, according to company spokesperson. All Google services were down for a while, including Gmail and Google AdSense. There seems to be a DNS hijack, as some screen grabs show that Google.com was redirecting to another site, SoGoSearch.com. "

15 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Slashdot and Google by brokencomputer · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah and Slashdot was down with a 503 error yesterday for quite a while. But seriously, Google shouldn't allow this to happen.

    1. Re:Slashdot and Google by antiphoton · · Score: 1, Insightful

      It's a free service, they don't owe you anything. If anything you should realise from the downtime how much you rely on Google, and you should appreciate it more.. Cause one day, Good Google(TM) won't be around :(

    2. Re:Slashdot and Google by Chess_the_cat · · Score: 2, Insightful
      They don't owe you anything.

      I wonder if Google's shareholders feel the same way or if they understand that they do owe their customers? They're a business; they owe me whatever it is I feel like asking for or I'll go elsewhere.

      --
      Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
    3. Re:Slashdot and Google by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Don't use that attitude on me, pal. Without people using Google, advertisers don't get ads seen, and Google doesn't get money. It depends on the end user.

      There's a lot of competition in the search engine market. I hope you don't run a businssines with that bad attitude of yours. It won't be around long.

  2. Has it gotten to this point yet? by fwice · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Are people really this dependant on google that when there is an outage, people really flip out?

    I mean, there are other search engines.
    Other email services.
    Other mapping things.

    Seriously, what were people doing a couple years ago? If your life is that in tuned to google, maybe its time to 'log off' (and pardon the cliche).

    1. Re:Has it gotten to this point yet? by telstar · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "What's stopping you from using another web-based e-mail account, or using your ISP's e-mail service?

      You mean, other than that not solving any problem? If the email service you use goes down, and you don't retain a local copy of that email, you immediately lose access to a wealth of information. Doesn't matter if it's GMail, Yahoo!, Hotmail, or whatever. I don't see how your suggestion solves the problem.

  3. Re:It's time to end our dependence on google by EllF · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ...or perhaps we reject Microsoft because we disagree with its corporate goals, and find its products to be substandard, while agreeing with Google's, and find its offering to be exactly what we want?

    --
    We who were living are now dying
    With a little patience
  4. Re:It's time to end our dependence on google by mattkinabrewmindspri · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Because Google doesn't suck. There really isn't anything that seems to compare.

    And if there is, please, show us. I'm interested.

    Monopolies aren't inherently evil. Monopolies that use their position to hurt consumers are evil, but I don't know of Google doing that.

  5. Re:SoGoSearch didn't hijack by Gollum · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In fact, I think they registered com.net, and simply created a wildcard DNS result for anything under that, which points to their search page.

    As the parent says, it is common behaviour for browsers to try appending common TLD's to the end of an URL that is not found verbatim. When Google went away, the browser appended .net to google.com, and ended up at *.com.net.

    A bug that people seem to be ignoring is that whatever browser is shown in the screenshot did not show the correct URL after the .net was appended, but left the original URL in the location bar.

  6. Re:Not a hijack by omb · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes, and every time we add 'tard' support to our
    code we add another potential _exploit_.

  7. Re:It's time to end our dependence on google by 91degrees · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Microsoft let me develop software for Windows for free. They even offer online help. Come to think of it, I'm sure they would have no ibjection to me giving them software for free as well.

    Of course Google let you submit a site for free. Their whole business model depends on it.

  8. It's time to end our dependence on nitrogen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    People of Slashdot! We unite, righteously, against the forces of Microsoft.

    Why do we do this? Because Microsoft is evil. Microsoft is a monopoly. We need to escape our dependence on Microsoft.

    Yet we all use nitrogen. Nitrogen with it's 80% air share. Nitrogen with its total control of the industrious cooling market. Nitrogen with its effective ownership of the car boosting business. Nitrogen the monopoly.

    Why the hypocrisy? Why do we support one monopoly while rejecting another? Should we not avoid nitrogen, even if not to punish them, because we need to be indepenedent of our suppliers. Don't give nitrogen control over the air. Use the alternatives!

    This brought to you by the H2S breathing aliens.

    Point is : the market share is not important in itself. What is important is, if it's deserved or if it's achieved through illegal means.

  9. The set of valid TLDs changes by tepples · · Score: 2, Insightful

    What kind of stupidity is it to blindly append a TLD to a URL that already ends in a valid TLD?

    When ".museum" was first added, how would existing browsers know that it is a valid TLD?

  10. Just think how this affected ISP help desks by IronChefMorimoto · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Imagine all the people who have Google.com set as their homepage when they start up a web browser. I can't imagine what happened to ISP help desk lines when Joe Bob Family Man hopped onto his computer Saturday night to check a golf score only to find a 404 error or some "page not found" error when he fired up MSIE.

    Think about it -- Google just doesn't go down. Not like some websites. It's so simply designed, and in some people's minds, that means it can't fail.

    Hell -- I stupidly went into my Linksys router interface after FireFox gave me a startup error to see if my ISP had dropped my connection. I didn't think to look at CNN.com or another website (which were working fine, so NOT an outage). Why?

    Google just doesn't go down. Reliance is a real bitch sometimes, no?

    IronChefMorimoto

  11. Re:Good example of why SPF's security holes by LogicX · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What does SPF have anything to do with this?

    If your domain is high-jacked due to a fault with the security of your domain registrar, then yes, you have bigger problems than any anti-spam solution.

    This is not the purpose of SPF

    If you read spf.pobox.com You can learn that SPF is merely designed to be a system which can eliminate domains being spoofed in the from field of spam messages.

    If someone is using one of my domains (logicx.net) to send spam; I can reduce the affect of such a joe-job attack by having a published SPF record; such that receiving systems can verify if the email came from a logicx.net mail server, and reject it appropriately.

    SPF and PGP have entirely different authentication approaches. I'd go so far as to say that PGP is more integrity checking.

    SPF is a verification that mail for a particular domain came from an appropriate server -- with the goal of disposing false emails (spam, spoofs, etc.)
    This is not at all a system to verify users on that particular email system.
    This is where PGP steps in -- It is used to verify the integrity of the email -- that it came from a particular user, and came unaltered.

    Finally, where has it been verified that their was a breach of their DNS system?

    All of the screenshots have now been confirmed to be a firefox situation where when DNS failed it resolved www.google.com.net -- which resolved to the people who own com.net

    --
    May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.