Apagão na Espanha e em Portugal: uma lição sobre a importância da redundância na arquitetura de DNS

A lesson in the importance of redundancy in your DNS architecture?

The ccTLDs for Spain and Portugal seem to be largely unaffected by an ongoing power cut that has seen both countries go into blackout (metaphorically) for the last several hours.

At time of writing, no explanation for the outage, which has also affected parts of France, has been given by authorities. Traffic lights, public transport, airports, radio stations and telecommunications networks have all reportedly been affected.

But .es and .pt domains appear to be resolving just fine, at least from where I’m sitting.

Both registries — DNS.pt and Red.es — have DNS resolution services distributed across multiple nameservers managed by multiple providers in multiple global locations.

As well as at home in Lisbon, .pt’s nameservers can be found as far afield as California and Brazil through partners Packet Clearing House and Nic.br. Red.es also uses PCH in California, though its remaining nodes are in Madrid.

Any data center worth a damn has an uninterruptable power supply and backup generators, so one assumes the local DNS nodes are up and running too.

DNS.pt has posted a notice on its web site saying that customer services are currently unavailable due to “circumstances beyond our control”.

It’s not clear if other registry systems have been affected by the outage, but presumably with a total lack of electricity registrants have more pressing things to worry about, like how to get home from work and whether the food in their freezers will be edible when they get there.