AT&T is having a DNS outage 8/15/2012

Noticing that you cannot access quite a few websites? Emails bouncing? Is your site traffic lower than it should be?

Is your domain’s DNS hosted with AT&T?

As of 12:21 pm EDT (we first noticed at 11:20 EDT) AT&T is experiencing a massive DNS outage.

 

This morning we started getting reports from users that inbound emails were bouncing. I soon discovered that I could not resolve our MX records externally, then that I could not even ping our website.

According to the Twitterverse AT&T is having a massive DNS outage presently. Our AT&T rep said it might be a DOS attack, and there was no estimate as to when it will be fixed.

 

UPDATE: 12:25 PM – (Glad I said something)

No sooner did I post this than our AT&T hosted DNS started responding again.

 

UPDATE 12:46 PM

Looks like it was only up long enough for my test server to get a cache – the authoritative DNS is still unresponsive.

 

UPDATE 2:20 PM

AT&T has informed some customers (including us) that the issue is resolved. Testing our site using the free Uptrends availability tool shows that it is somewhat responsive… however inbound email is still not working reliably and http://www.mxtoolbox.com says our DNS servers are still timing out.

According to a comment on this post, this outage started at 9:30 am, and it is still causing problems for us 6 hours later.