Don't blame DNS for Facebook outage
Experts in the inner workings of the Internet’s Domain Name System – which matches IP addresses with corresponding domain names—say the 27-year-old communications protocol does not appear to be the cause of Facebook’s high-profile outage last week.
Facebook’s service was unavailable to its 500 million active users for 2.5 hours on Thursday -- the company’s worst failure in more than four years. Initial news reports blamed the outage on DNS because end users received a “DNS error” message when they couldn’t reach the site.
"There's probably a lesson here that the problem at various times looked like DNS, but ultimately proved not to be," said Cricket Liu, vice president of architecture at Infoblox, which sells DNS appliances. "In my experience, users are quick to point fingers at DNS (perhaps because Web browsers like to implicate DNS when they can't get somewhere) but DNS often isn't at fault."
