An Internet outage which has been caused by a DNS issue at domain and DNS provider Enom is affecting business and people across the country. So if you are having trouble getting on the Internet, or getting to a website or other destination on the Internet, it’s quite possibly because of the DNS failure at Enom. Enom is, among other things, a domain provider (much like GoDaddy, with whom more people may be familiar), which means that they also provide DNS (domain name service) for those domains.
This is, of course, not the first time (by far) that an Internet provider has ended up causing dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands of websites to suddenly go dark and unreachable. Sometimes it’s collateral damage from a poorly executed but otherwise intended action (such as when Pakistan accidentally triggered a world-wide YouTube outage), and sometimes as is the case today with Enom, it’s completely unintentional and a big oopsie.
According to Enom, at about 8:00 a.m. EST today (January 17th as of the writing of this article) they were “investigating reports of DNS resolution and management issues, as well as domain registration difficulties, post maintenance. Our engineering team continues to work on these customer-facing issues and certify their correct operation. We will provide updates as they become available.”
Enom’s DNS hosting services, according to Enom, are included free for their domain registration customers, and cost $4 per year for domains not registered through Enom. Here’s the thing though, Enom also resells its DNS services to other hosts. So, although this has not been officially confirmed, at least in theory this will also affect businesses who get their DNS through other hosts (hosts who are reselling Enom’s DNS).
Here is the entire set of updates from Enom, current as of 1:37 p.m. EST. You can also see them, as well as follow-up ones, at enomstatus.com
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Enom DNS Outage Update
Update – As of 1 PM EST (18:00 UTC), our engineers have introduced an interim solution and continue to work on a system-wide solution, both of which will resolve the DNS resolution issue that certain end customers have been experiencing.
No action is required from customers. As of right now:
* Impacted customers should see their websites resolve imminently
* Any email service interruptions related to missing MX records should be resolved
* Resellers can now successfully generate the list of domains in their account using the Enom Control Panel
If you continue to experience resolution issues, we recommend clearing your browser history/cache.
At this time, the ability to update DNS records via the Enom Control Panel and API will remain disabled. Any DNS update requests have been backlogged and will be provisioned as soon as we’ve implemented our system-wide solution.
New domain registrations and renewals continue to process normally.
We will continue to update as these issues are resolved. The next update will be provided no later than 2:00 PM EST (19:00 UTC).
Jan 17, 10:02 PST
Update – Our engineering team continues to work to restore our systems. In the past hour we have:
* Begun work to implement our system-wide solution for impacted customers
* In parallel, developed a short term fix to the DNS resolution issues that certain end customers have been experiencing
We will continue to update as these issues are resolved. The next update will be provided no later than 1:00 PM EST (18:00 UTC).
Jan 17, 09:00 PST
Update – Our engineering team continues to work to restore our systems. At present, we are seeing issues with our DNS and Reseller Control Panel. As of 10:50 AM EST (15:50 UTC) we can report the following:
Impacted end customers (registrants) are experiencing service interruptions:
* Some websites are not resolving due to missing or incorrect DNS records.
* Some customers may experience email service interruptions due to missing DNS MX records
Please note: We’ve disabled DNS updates via the Enom Control Panel and API for all domains to ensure we don’t interfere with our ongoing efforts to restore DNS records for domains impacted by the DNS issue. New domain registrations and renewals are working as intended.
Resellers are experiencing the following services issues:
* Resellers will be unable to search for or view the list of domains in their account using the Enom Control Panel.
We will provide regular updates as we continue to resolve these issues. The next update will be provided by 12:00 PM EST (17:00 UTC).
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This outage started sometime on January 15th, during a maintenance window that had been scheduled for 6am-6pm PST. According to an email notice sent by eNom on the 12th, the only thing that was supposed to have been impacted was user logins to the portal. But as you said, things went very wrong. Everything seems to be substantially functioning again by about 2pm PST- perhaps 40 hours since the outage began – but as of now (about 5:45pm PST on January 17), there are still some reports of websites down, and at least some users apparently cannot make some changes to their settings, such as change their name servers. eNom has said that there will be a backlog of changes in the queue. There are some pretty angry folks out there. And many of us would like to know the cause of this, why there was no effective fail-back plan, and how eNom will prevent this from recurring.