Update on September 12th: Following investigation, GoDaddy has officially stated that the service outage was caused by a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. It was earlier believed that this disruption was caused by a Denial of Service attack (DDoS).
As you may already know, a significant share of Techinline users on both the Client’s and Expert’s ends were unable to start the Techinline application or access our homepage for a span of several hours yesterday afternoon. This down-time was caused by a massive DDoS attack on Techinline’s domain registrar, GoDaddy.
GoDaddy, one of world’s the largest domain registrars and hosting providers, was hit by an apparent DDoS attack from Anonymous, which resulted in millions of websites including Techinline being taken down. The attack effected GoDaddy’s DNS (Domain Name System) servers, which direct browsers to the correct IP address after a domain name is requested. Since Techinline uses GoDaddy’s DNS, this outage effected a number of our customers who were unable to access the Techinline service or homepage for an extended period of time.
[image url=”https://blog.techinline.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/GoDaddy-Twitter.png” alignment=”left” margin_left=”0″ margin_right=”0″ margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”0″]The technical reason for the failure was caused by the inaccessibility of GoDaddy’s DNS servers — specifically CNS1.SECURESERVER.NET, CNS2.SECURESERVER.NET, and CNS3.SECURESERVER.NET which were failing to resolve.
According to GoDaddy, the outage started at around 1:30 PM (EST) and services for the bulk of effected users were restored only by 5:30 PM (EST).
Based on our statistics and estimates, roughly 20% of Techinline users were effected by this outage. We understand the negative implications of this unexpected disruption and have already developed a backup strategy which will help us effectively address similar issues in the future. Specifically, we’ve implemented a reserve (backup) domain which will be used whenever the operation of our primary DNS is disrupted in any way. This will ensure that the problem experienced yesterday does not repeat in the future.
We apologize for any inconvenience caused, and thank you for your understanding and valued business with Techinline. Please do not hesitate to contact us with any feedback or suggestions that you may have regarding yesterday’s outage, or any other matter.
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