New Report: Many Alexa Top 100 Sites are Susceptible to Single DNS Provider Outages

Just days after the massive DNS outage that reportedly downed top brands like Twitter, Etsy, Spotify, and Netflix; DNS Made Easy has released a new report that shines a light on even more brands that are still susceptible to single DNS provider outages.

DNS Made Easy, the world leader in speed and reliability, has released findings highlighting critical vulnerabilities amongst the Alexa top 100 websites. Last Friday’s DNS outage was attributed to a top DNS provider suffering from a DDoS attack. The attack resulted in dozens of top brands being unavailable for much of the US East Coast and parts of Europe. The study seeks to help brands set up preventative measures, such as Secondary DNS, to ensure they maintain uptime when their DNS provider can’t.

“We examined the Alexa top 100 domains to see which companies were still using only one DNS provider. We were shocked to find that 58% of domains that outsource their DNS were still using only a single provider solution,” says President of DNS Made Easy Steven Job, “These statistics were shocking, as it has proven time and time again that any business reliant on the Internet should use multiple DNS providers to increase redundancy.”

The study notes that businesses still using a single DNS provider configuration are vulnerable to suffering downtime just like the brands that were knocked offline last week. The use of a secondary DNS provider can prevent outages because when the primary provider fails to respond to queries, then the secondary provider instantly takes over the traffic load.

Even domains that use in-house DNS configurations can take advantage of secondary DNS services. “Hybrid DNS configurations, the combination of an in-house network with a cloud DNS provider as a backup, has become a growing trend,” says Job, “Secondary DNS should be a standard practice amongst large brands who value performance and reliability.”

The study found that 64% of the top 100 websites still use in-house DNS configurations. Usually an in-house configuration is preferred if an organization has very specific configurations. The DNS Made Easy study found that following Friday’s outage, many affected domains made the decision to add a secondary DNS provider. Some of which were domains that were previously only using an in-house configuration.

The study notes that brands like Etsy and PayPal have doubled down on their DNS providers within the days following the attack. The engineers also noted that a handful of the companies that used Friday’s downed provider switched to a new provider altogether, without adding a secondary provider as backup. Switching to a new provider can improve performance, but still lacks the redundancy that a secondary provider can offer.

About DNS Made Easy
DNS Made Easy is a subsidiary of Tiggee LLC, and is a world leader in providing global IP Anycast enterprise DNS services. DNS Made Easy implemented the industry’s first triple independent Anycast cloud architecture for maximum DNS speed and DNS redundancy. Originally launched in 2002, DNS Made Easy’s services have grown to manage hundreds of thousands of customer domains receiving more than 30 billion queries per day. Today, DNS Made Easy builds on a proud history of uptime and is the preferred DNS hosting choice for most major brands, especially companies that compare price and performance of enterprise IP Anycast alternatives.

Originally published at DNS Made Easy News.