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DOD operated root nameservers experience 9 hour outage
The root nameservers [wikipedia.org] play an extremely important role on the internet, providing the topmost level of the public facing DNS hierarchy. Without them, the internet as most consumers know it simply ceases to function.
On April 13, nameserver operators across the globe noticed something strange: the nameserver clusters comprising g.root-servers.net ("G-root") ceased responding to UDP queries for a period of nine hours. While it isn't unheard of [root-servers.org] for a cluster of servers receiving Anycast traffic for a root node to become unreachable, this event was fairly unusual in that there was a total outage of UDP for G-root observed across the world [ripe.net].
G-root is operated by the US Department of Defense. Thus far, they have only issued the following public statement [dns-oarc.net]:
Regarding yesterday's G-root outage:
Like many outages, this one resulted from a series of unfortunate events.
These unfortunate events were operational errors; steps have been taken to
prevent any reoccurrence, and to provide better service in the future.
Jim Cassell
DoD NIC
It should be noted that this was a non-event from the perspective of DNS servers worldwide, as the remaining letters of the root nameserver alphabet soup were still available to answer queries.
