Yikes, that article is pretty over the top. It could collapse the internet? Nah…
I saw some Internet-based information systems on Czech railways down today. An information kiosk was showing Firefox’s “Address not found” error page, one train had no onboard Wi-Fi and no tickets were getting checked. A store I went to did not accept cards today, either. Trains were unusually delayed too, I heard at least 3 different vague reasons over the PAS (technical problems with train, diversion, unforeseen circumstances).
However, except for that train I was able to connect to various known networks and they all worked.
I can’t imagine how this incident you noticed is connected to the root server issue.
As long as there are no relevant changes in the root zone (and according to the article, there were none) this root server issue was likely without impact.
This server, maintained by Internet carrier Cogent Communications
Found the problem!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This server, maintained by Internet carrier Cogent Communications, is one of the 13 root servers that provision the Internet’s root zone, which sits at the top of the hierarchical distributed database known as the domain name system, or DNS.
When someone enters wikipedia.org in their browser, the servers handling the request first must translate the human-friendly domain name into an IP address.
Each root sever is, in fact, a cluster of servers that are also geographically dispersed, providing even more redundancy.
If keys aren’t identical across all 13 root servers, there’s an increased risk of attacks such as DNS cache poisoning.
For reasons that remain unclear outside of Cogent—which declined to comment for this post—all 12 instances of the c-root it’s responsible for maintaining suddenly stopped updating on Saturday.
Stéphane Bortzmeyer, a French engineer who was among the first to flag the problem in a Tuesday post, noted then that the c-root was three days behind the rest of the root servers.
The original article contains 498 words, the summary contains 162 words. Saved 67%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
