• Tuesday, October 4, 2022

Message from DNS: Statement about the DNS outage of 4 October

Dear customer, 

Today between 8:30 CET and 10:45 CET we experienced a massive outage on our DNS services. The reason is that we introduced a new firewall service for all of our customers that use our free DNS last Friday. Our premium DNS service was not affected.

We noticed that some direct traffic was still possible during the weekend and yesterday. We were not sure where that traffic came from.

We detected tens of thousands of domains of customers that were using direct IP addresses to connect to our DNS servers. Although we were sure this was not possible, we wanted to investigate it thoroughly before completely blocking direct customer requests to our nameservers today. 

Unfortunately, a massive DDOS attack hit us in the morning that interfered with our research and it brought everything down. 

We had to shut down our DNS servers in order to apply the new security measures before we could bring everything up again.

It is now clear that the direct traffic was not coming from our customer's domains, as we expected, but from abusive traffic bypassing our firewall.

It took longer than expected because we wanted to make sure that everything would be working smoothly before we brought the DNS live again.

Right now the new DNS Firewall is up and the DNS service will perform much better than anytime before. 

We apologize for all the inconveniences and we really appreciate your continuous support.

Best regards,

DNS & Atmos