Google's 15 min DNS headache
Date: May 10, 2005Source: ployer
Saturday, access to the world's leading Internet search engine, google.com was unavailable for 15 mins. The search page reportedly was down from 6:45 p.m. to 7 p.m. EST. Access to Gmail, Google News and other properties were unavailable during that period. The problem was related to the Domain Name System (DNS), which maps web names to the numerical Internet Protocol (IP) addresses used by computers.
Within minutes of the outage rumors of a Google hack started making the Internet rounds.
"It was not a hacking or security issue," spokesman David Krane told Associated Press. "Google's global properties were unavailable for a short period of time. We have remedied the problem and access to Google has been restored worldwide."
Some users reported being redirected to an alternative search service called SoGoSearch. The . Engineer, Paul Mutton says the nature of the outage suggests that local DNS servers (operated by Google) were unable to resolve the name www.google.com because Google's DNS server was malfunctioning and so instead resorted to trying close matches, such as www.google.com.net, which points to SoGoSearch.
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