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Google DNS Glitch Caused Outage

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the not-much-else-happens-on-sunday-morning dept.

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. "

2 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. 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).

  2. 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.