An Update on Today’s DNS Outage: A Message From Our CEO

by Ken Carnesi on Jan 25, 2022 12:00:00 AM

As a recursive DNS resolver, we take any incident or perceived outage very seriously as a company. We know that you rely on us to be highly available as your DNS provider and DNS security. We recognize DNS is a critical aspect of your infrastructure, and for our MSP partners, that of your customers as well.

On Thursday January 13th at 20:08pm UTC and again on Tuesday, January 25th at 14:33 UTC, we began to receive tickets from users in the Northeastern United States stating they were experiencing DNS timeouts. Based on our monitoring, it seems that just under 1% of our network was impacted. Our network monitoring also showed a BGP route peering change which was shifting a heavy volume of DNS traffic to our nodes in Eastern Europe. The initial form of notifications to our customers was posted on our status page.

Our engineers discovered the root cause was a provider that made an upstream peering change. In both incidents, we immediately stopped advertising to that node and restored traffic right away. Service was completely restored by 20:27 UTC and 14:47 UTC, respectively.

When we select service providers and begin the process of deploying new anycast nodes, we tune our BGP advertisements and blocks based on the network paths which give our customers the best experience. In this particular case, our provider added a new peering connection that introduced routing changes that negatively impacted some of our customers. In response, we removed that node from service until we could fully understand the change and tune our BGP advertisements. We are actively improving our observability to detect and respond to these types of changes more quickly, ahead of any customer impact.

We will further vet this new provider to ensure they’re truly able to meet our SLAs. We hold our providers to a very stringent process—any providers unable to meet our SLAs will be eliminated from the DNSFilter network.

I sincerely apologize to our customers for this inconvenience, especially all those impacted. We remain highly committed to operating a reliable and innovative platform that you can trust.

Sincerely,

Ken Carnesi
Founder & CEO

Topics: DNSFilter Updates

Artificial Intelligence in Cybersecurity

The term “artificial intelligence (AI)” was first coined in 1956. While progress stalled for many years, we can thank IBM for sparking real interest in AI as viable technology: First in 1997 when the computer Deep Blue defeated a chess champion and again in 2011 when Watson won Jeopardy!

The Mind Games Behind Cyber Attacks

Hackers have long understood that the most sophisticated firewall is no match for a well-placed psychological trick. While many focus on the technical prowess of cybercriminals, the real magic often lies in their ability to manipulate human behavior. By exploiting our natural tendencies and cognitive biases, hackers can slip past even the most robust security systems. It's not just about cracking codes; it's about cracking the human psyche.

AI and Cybersecurity Risks: Why DNS Filtering is Critical for AI-Driven Workplaces

Artificial intelligence is transforming business operations, automating everything from customer service to data analysis. But with these advancements come new security challenges. AI-driven cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated, enabling attackers to automate phishing campaigns, generate malware, and exfiltrate sensitive data at scale. Without proper safeguards, AI tools can unintentionally leak corporate secrets or connect to malicious ...