👀
(twitter.com)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (49)
sorted by:
Non techie here what does that mean?
Imagine your phone forgetting all your contacts. And you don't have their phone numbers memorized.
I am old enough to remember when we did memorize our friends phone numbers. And had a little physical real world thing called an address book.
You just reminded me to print out a copy of my current contacts list!
Let's say you just finished writing a letter to grandma.
You put the letter in the mailbox and the little flag up.
The mailman comes to your house and picks up the letter.
The letter makes its way to the post office where suddenly, the post office finds someone deleted grandma's address from their records so they don't know how to get it to her.
The post office doesn't deliver your letter.
Basically that, but with people sending letters to facebook.com and instagram.com
Interesting analogy except for the part where you forgot that the post office can read the address of your grandma on the envelope. Or is this about the laziness of the postal service?
In my analogy, the post office (router) lost the address and doesn't know where to send it.
If you understood how network packets (envelope) work, you would know the address is there to be read but the piece of hardware that's supposed to read it and route it doesn't know how because it doesn't have the right address to send it to anymore.
I hope that helps you better understand my analogy.
Got it, thanks... I was just joking , sorry.
DNS is kind of like how GPS gives you friendly directions. It gives you human readable directions to your destination. Can you imagine if you had to enter GPS coordinates when you just want to find 1234 Great Rd.
However with DNS there is no one mega server under a volcano that controls the internet, rather its a network of systems that all collaborate with eachother. "hey I know where those coordinates go to, heres how I know and also tell every one you know that we know"
Some one or some thing decided to just forget how to get to a certain destination and somehow that forgetfulness got passed on and no one caught it. Or the forgetfulness hit all the systems at the same time before they could update eachother with the real directions.
I guess that's the great discussion. Regardless of what officially happened, things like this have happened before and will continue to happen.
One server going down, blown up, pulled into a blackhole, or whatever would not bring the entirey of DNS down. There is no one ring to rule them all in DNS so a change in one would not affect the rest. But there is a main group (I forgot how many) of authoritative DNS servers that all the other DNS servers look to. And they are spread out geographically all over the world. So that's why when you see things happen like this sometimes a site it down in Europe but everything is fine in the USA.
So something happened to those main DNS servers. I don't know where disclose.tv got their information from regarding the entry being removed.
Malicious? Hell of a feat to pull off on a global scale.
Intentional? Good conspiracy route. Maybe theres something to be disrupted on purpose. Maybe an agenda is being played out. WEF said a global cyber attack was going to be the next big thing.
Accidental is most logical, but it would need to be combined with stupid. So maybe a config was changed or an update performed on a main authoritative DNS server. And in that process something got corrupted or stepped on or changed, then no one noticed it and allowed the error to replicated.
It's not out of reason if there was a big update or patch in a piece of software or a firmware update on a piece of hardware then it would need to be performed on all of the affected software and/or hardware. So if a bunch of DNS servers all got patched at or around the same time and some "entries" got bumped then a bunch of DNSs at the same time are starting to replicate bad information. Again, stupidity here to patch all mission critical things at the same time and not simulate it before deploying the patch to a live environment. Unfortunately IT is one of the first things to be cut at businesses in the name of cost savings.
Very well written analysis fren
It means the problem isn't even in facebooks control. DNS servers resolve a web address (Facebook.com) with it's ip address. So if it's been removed then when you you're in the web address, it doesn't know where to send you
Every website has a numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address. That is actually how they are identified.
The DNS or Domain Name Server cross references the domain name to the IP address and directs you to the site. If the name is not in the DNS table then looking for a website by name will return an error. And the only way to find the site is with the IP address.