Skip to main content

DNS Issue Affects LinkedIn and Causes Outage

By VJ
If you checked LinkedIn, the social network for professionals circa eight hours ago, you might have noticed the service was not available. It instead displayed this particular website (image from TNW):

TNW shows LinkedIn hijacked page

Approximately eight hours ago, an outage spanning several hours was noticed on LinkedIn, and the people started worrying that the service was being hacked into. Here are the outage details from DownRightNow:

LinkedIn down more than six hours ago

However, LinkedIn later confirmed on Twitter that the outage was caused by a DNS issue. Here’s the tweet:


What is the DNS issue they are talking about? Every website has to be tied to a specific IP address or a range of IPs. Although the website has a domain name (bluebugle.org, linkedin.com, google.com, etc.), this domain name has to be resolved to an IP address in order to correctly locate the website’s servers. In the case of LinkedIn, the IP address is 216.52.242.86. Check this out (click to enlarge):

DNS propagation chart of LinkedIn

The DNS propagation chart of LinkedIn shows that it is correctly identified in all locations at this time. The IP address not only identifies the domain name linkedin.com, but also other domains associated with LinkedIn Corporation, such as linkedin.bg, lnkd.in, linkedin.it, linkedin.com.au, etc.

When the service disruption happened, a probable DNS hijack did occur and the LinkedIn redirected to a different IP address, specifically one belonging to the network service provider called Confluence Networks. This was the reason why the entire website was replaced by quite a different kind of home page, more specifically an ad-ridden MFA-style site you saw above.

LinkedIn is already back in service now, with occasional non-fatal outages experienced by all kinds of services.
Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Technologies on Smartphones That You Should Look For

By VJ
Apple has unveiled two underwhelming products with iPhone 5S and 5C . That was the major news for the last week. Although the devices completely lacked any inspiration, they have included two very important things—the touch ID sensor for security and the 64-bit architecture for better computing. Earlier we also mentioned what Apple should have done . In Android devices, we have a huge number of innovations too that we got to see in the past few months. In this article, let me discuss a few innovations that you have to look for in your next smartphone. 1. NFC Near Field Communication has always been regarded as a cutting edge technology. You can’t throw a stone now without hitting an Android device with NFC technology. It is a secure way that devices can connect by simply bringing them together. Right now, NFC has yet to find applications in the current smartphone market. The technology is not new, although it has yet to have any big applications. However, NFC has its importance.
Read the full article »

Five Great Alternatives for iGoogle Home Page Portal

By VJ
Google’s popular home page service, iGoogle will be retired on November 1st, 2013. That’s a little over a year of managing your home page through this service. It came as a great disappointment to me since I had been using the service for a long time. I have a nice home page set up in iGoogle with news from BBC, CNN, and others; my calendar; a widget for time management; topic-specific news on technology, stock quotes, weather; and some other interesting stuff. It was a page that I woke up to for many days. It seems obvious that the popularity of home page services has been coming down in the recent years; another popular service in this arena, Netvibes has turned into something else entirely. I could have turned my attention to Netvibes after they retire iGoogle, but that won’t happen now. I will miss Google’s home page, and before that I want to find out another portal service that I could love as I do iGoogle. In search for one, I found these great services which can replace iG
Read the full article »

A Tablet Running Both Windows and Android Side By Side

By VJ
The latest innovation from Samsung is the ATIV Q tablet, a streamlined 13-inch tablet that is extremely powerful and not that chunky for a tight competitor to the likes of Microsoft Surface Pro. It is thin, extremely powerful, and has a large brilliant QHD resolution screen, which is higher than Full HD. QHD is 3200x1800 pixels, while FHD is 1920x1280 pixels. Let’s take a brief look at this device. Technical Specifications The tablet-laptop mash-up is not yet in the market. We may update this post as it is made available in the market. Here are the brief technical specifications of the tablet. Display 13.3 inch; 3200x1800 px (the highest in the market); 16 million colors Processor Intel Haswell Core i5 processor (details unknown) RAM 4 GB Graphics Intel HD 4000 Storage 128 GB SSD Battery life 9 hours of usage Operating system(s) Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean; Windows 8
Read the full article »