Have you ever heard about a DNS outage? If the answer is no, no worries. You are in the right place. In this article, we will take place at what it purpose is, what can cause it, and how you protect against it.
DNS outage – definition
A DNS outage, also known as DNS downtime, occurs when the DNS fails to work correctly for an extended period of time. This means that you won’t find the IP address if you look for the domain name. Users will instead perform DNS requests to visit your domain. The DNS recursive server will request the domain’s authoritative nameserver, but it will receive an error message as a response.
Factors that cause a DNS outage
We can agree that the DNS outage is a really troublesome moment. However, it can be caused by different things, one of which are:
- An occurrence in the data center (the site of the authoritative name server). The “cloud” is located in a data center or multiple data centers, not in the sky. And while such locations are safe, they are not foolproof. Especially when it comes to natural disasters, power outages, and other issues. Several things can cause your authoritative name server to go offline.
- The upkeep of authoritative name servers. Updates or reboots are occasionally required as part of routine maintenance. This disables the server’s ability to respond to DNS requests.
- Denial-of-Service and Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks. DoS and DDoS assaults aim to cause a denial of service. You will experience a DNS outage if they succeed.
- Configuration errors. DNS outages can be caused by a variety of human errors when configuring DNS. Script errors, incorrectly typed IP address, firewall configuration issues, etc.
How can you prevent it?
There are different ways to protect you against DNS outage. Here are some of them:
- Load balancing service. Having a lot of traffic might be a double-edged sword. They could result from hard labor or indicate a DoS or DDoS attack in the process. In addition, DNS load balancing is an effective way to spread traffic across all of a network’s servers. You can avoid overloading individual servers, deal with traffic spikes, and handle excessive traffic in general.
- DDoS protection service. Advanced and continuous monitoring, firewalls, software, hardware, and DDoS deflation to absorb the attack, among other things.
- Secondary DNS service. You already have a DNS service provider (Primary DNS). You could hire a separate provider and set them up as Secondary nameservers using their various Secondary DNS servers. A copy of the zone file and DNS records will be stored on these servers. As a result, they’ll be able to reply to DNS requests the same way as Primary DNS does. You’ll have a backup in case the final one goes down.
- Monitoring service. The only way to know traffic like the back of your hand is to monitor it continually. You can distinguish between typical and abnormal traffic this way. You can take action based on traffic behavior to avert an attack or deal with a regular spike in traffic. Current solutions allow you to monitor specific places in real-time to identify whether the problem is local, regional, global, and so on.
Conclusion
Now you are familiar with the DNS outage and its consequences. Don’t let it hitch a ride on your system, but take preventive measures to protect yourself.