Total blackout of UsenetBucket due to domain failure

As you might have noticed, we were completely unreachable last night for about three hours. Our traffic images shows an almost complete halt of all the traffic between 00:20 (CET) and 03:15 (CET). The strange thing about the situation was that every system (both our platform, website, etc.) seemed down at the same time. Since all of our own systems are located somewhere else and are built redundant, this has a very, very small chance of happening.

So what happened?

We started to receive warnings about 00:20 and tried to find the issue. Quickly we found out that all of our own systems were working fine, including our platform and website, however all of them were unreachable. The problem was quickly found at the company that registered and maintains our domain name.

According to a statement we received from them this morning: “Last night we had a malfunction with one of our suppliers which made our network unreachable.“.

The issue that caused this, is due the fact that our suppliers network was unreachable, a DNS request of our domain could not be resolved into a correct IP-address. This ment that whenever you tried connecting to “www.usenetbucket.com” or “reader.usenetbucket.com”, it could not be looked up to a valid IP-address and your connection was dropped instantly.

This single point of failure, eventhough our own system redundancy, caused a total “blackout” of UsenetBucket for about three hours.

Conclusion

Since our suppliers network was reachable again around 03:15 (CET), the domain name and DNS was responding again. Since our systems were still up and running, you were able to connect quickly once again.

We are very sorry for the inconvencience this might have caused. Today we will be hard working on a solution to prevent this from happening in the future.