Network Solutions, a registrar for domain names, is having some sort of outage today which is causing their DNS not to resolve. Anyone that has their domain registered with Network Solutions may be experiencing issues with access to their site. This is impacting some of our clients as well as many other sites across the internet.
What is DNS and why is this happening. DNS = Domain Name Server. Basically it is the listing that tells browsers like Internet Explorer or Firefox where the domain is located. Just image when you need to know what number to dial when you want to order a pizza, you would go to the phone book and look up Joe’s Pizza. Now imagine that for some reason half the pages were missing from the phone book, or you couldn’t find the phone book at all. The Phone Book is the DNS in this situation.
Bottom line if your domain name is registered through Network Solutions, and you are using their DNS Servers for your domain, your website and email may be down or intermittently available until the problem is resolved.
The company experienced a similar problem last July that they blamed on hacking, or a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. With such an attack hackers direct thousands of computers to hit the website all at once, which then overwhelms the server.
“Unfortunately, cybercrime is a persistent threat in today’s world. Despite our best efforts, no one is immune–including large providers like Network Solutions,” the company said on Facebook.
I guess we will have to wait and see if this is the scenario this time.
