Slashdot Mirror
Why Browsers Blamed DNS For Facebook Outage
Julie188 writes "That was probably the only time 'DNS' will ever be a trending term on Twitter. The cause was Facebook's 2.5 hour outage on Thursday, which incorrectly told users trying to access the site that a DNS error was to blame. In truth, experts who've read Facebook's explanation say the site went down because Facebook gave itself a distributed denial-of-service attack when a system admin misconfigured a database. So why was DNS blamed? The 27-year-old communications protocol has been known to cause other, somewhat similar outages."
It wasn't your browser having a DNS error, it was the user facing servers at Facebook reporting DNS problems talking to whoever they talk to. Maybe when they decided the way to fix the problem was to take down the site, they just removed the back end server cluster from their internal DNS.
I can understand why that may cause people to think the problem is with DNS. The error message looks like it came from an http proxy. That would suggest that either the user had a proxy configured or facebook were using a reverse proxy. If it was the later, the DNS "problem" would be inside their network.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
I think that comment was referring to the fact that some recent announcement said there are now 5 billion devices on the internet, and IPv4 supports only up to 3.7 billion devices.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Yet, you failed to notice that /. is a site for nerds.
Many nerds do not thrive to cultivate their social skills.
Checking their friends status on social network might not be on top of their agendas.
So: event was notable, but not very important to many slashdotters.