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

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