It’s easy to blame outside factors when your network systems go a bit odd, but it’s a good idea to make sure it really isn’t your stuff that’s gone decidedly weird first. So this morning, some of my colleagues and I spent a while prodding our DNS servers with a stick* to see why Google, Apple and Yahoo domains kept bouncing up and down. The common factor was that they all used Akamai’s DNS.
It looks like our theory was correct: Akamai DNS problem affected large sites
The worrying aspect of this is that so many large sites were depending on one company. The title of this Metafilter item is very apt: A Couple of Large Pieces, Joined at the Hip** Commercial pressures are making the Internet’s low level structure too linear and prone to failures, and software and service monocultures (Apache and Bind for instance) are weakening the higher levels.
Or maybe I just worry about these things too much.
(* Not literally.) (** As opposed to the design ideal of ‘small pieces, loosely joined’)
