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. "

Comments

.tld.tld silliness

[chrysalis]

When the Google name servers didn't work, web browsers tried to add ".com" and ".net" to the URL. And http://www.google.com.net/ is Sogosearch, because the "com.net" domain exists and it is owned by Sogosearch.

Just like the "net.com" domain that is also registered by another company.

Culprits are:
- registrar who allows registration of .tld.tld domain names,
- web browsers that are trying to add suffixes even though the domain name of the URL already has a known suffix.

Of course the TLD namespace is a moving target, but that rule could at least be enforced with .com/.net/.org/.biz/.edu/.mil.

Re:SoGoSearch

[legirons]

"I think it's far more likely that there are quite a few people out there with some sort of malware redirecting their failed DNS lookups to this site"

If there was, then the malware was working on a fully-patched and firewalled Ubuntu machine last night, which would be fairly unusual.

Perhaps something at the ISP level would be more likely, as it would affect large groups of people at a time and it's not like poisoning ISPs' DNS is unthinkable (most of the people I saw mentioning the outage were from the UK, from a couple of ISPs)

Or perhaps there's a real explanation, as yours and mine are really just guesses.