[outages] DNS issues with .gov on Tuesday 4/24?

[Julian Y Koh]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Was anyone aware of any issues that might have affected DNS resolution for some .gov domains (specifically grants.gov) on Tuesday 4/24 around 3-5pm US Central Time?  We weren't alerted to the problem until 4:25pm, and things started working again around 4:45pm, so we didn't have time to really troubleshoot.  By the time we saw the ticket and the like, all we had time to do was verify that DNS was failing for us from AS103 and a couple of other DNS testing sites like kloth.net with the "no servers could be reached" error.  Users report that DNS resolution was working though from their cellular data networks as well as the public Wi-Fi in the Burger King across the street from their offices, so it does not appear to have been a universal outage. 

Anecdotally, our users report that there may have been similar errors with nsf.gov and nih.gov earlier that day, but we have no actual data on that.  We also found some earlier issues noted with .gov such as the one mentioned at <http://forums.comcast.com/t5/Connectivity-and-Modem-Help/Re-Comcast-DNS-issue-gov-site-not-resolving/td-p/1261913>.  However, we have been unable to find any actual external verification of our exact issue, which would be useful since we had a few grant proposals get rejected because our researchers missed their deadline.

Obviously there are any number of possible causes for this problem, and the grants.gov people seem to be having issues escalating our tickets with them to the group that would have a better chance of investigating from their end (and of course the actual problem could have been outside both of our spheres of influence).  

Thanks for any information that can be shared!


- -- 
Julian Y. Koh
Manager, Network Transport, Telecommunications and Network Services
Northwestern University Information Technology (NUIT)
2001 Sheridan Road #G-166
Evanston, IL 60208
847-467-5780
NUIT Web Site: <http://www.it.northwestern.edu/>
PGP Public Key:<http://bt.ittns.northwestern.edu/julian/pgppubkey.html>



-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG/MacGPG2 v2.0.17 (Darwin)
Comment: GPGTools - http://gpgtools.org

iEYEARECAAYFAk+eftsACgkQDlQHnMkeAWMswQCgnrfyqy4F8TNft8FlfnNTdjS6
AU4AnitqXt3L2EkNP7X2SNXO8E2yO+Qg
=PmNP
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----