So I was trying to read my GMail on Saturday when I noticed I couldn’t get to it. I tried Google’s homepage as well and also failed. I was in a hurry to get to a meeting that I didn’t bother to check what was wrong.

Fast forward to Sunday…I start reading reports that Google is announcing that they had a DNS problem.

Didn’t make much sense to me that someone as large and complex as Google would have this type of a screw up. Then it dawned on me that the following all occurred within a short time frame (in no particular order):
1. Web Accelerator launches
2. Many people find WA problems
3. Google turns off downloading of WA and posts the following message:

Thank you for your
interest in Google Web Accelerator.
We have currently reached our
maximum capacity of users and
are actively working to increase
the number of users we can support.

4. Google has “DNS” problems.

I find it hard to believe Google would have such a glitch and not have sufficient redundancy, especially in this day of Sarbanes-Oxley and controls.

Well, I decided to search and found a link to an SEO spam site but that stole some content which led me to this post which shows an interesting whois during the outage. I would imagine that hijacking their DNS (regardless of what the DNS TTL is and given the relatively small packet size of a DNS request) would essentially amount to a DDOS attack by individuals trying to get to Google and its properties with quite a few “zombies” :-) … you’d have to have a fairly large infrastructure (including bandwidth, CPU, etc) to support those requests.

The fact that the “whois” was altered makes me wonder if it was the root DNS servers that were “hacked.”

More info here and here.

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