About Monday’s incident on the breakdown of social media platforms i.e. Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram which was caused by configuration change on their network.
“Our engineering teams have learned that configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centers communicate, bringing our services to a halt.“ Santosh Janardhan: Facebook VP, Infrastructure
This led to their Facebook DNS failure to resolve and hence their network infrastructure IPs were unreachable.
Here is an overview on how the Domain Name System (DNS) works:
The Domain Name System (DNS) is a naming database in which internet domain names are located and translated into internet protocol (IP) addresses e.g. once you type on the web browser google.com the DNS helps to translate it to 8.8.8.8.
The DNS translates requests for names into IP addresses similar to how your mobile Phonebook application translates how you have saved names into actual numbers that the mobile network can understand.
Similar to what Facebook experienced, a DNS outage can heavily interrupt critical online services, websites and applications since DNS is the gateway into the internet.
This downtime also exposed the vulnerability of over-reliance on social media for business. A lot of online-only businesses were at a complete standstill as they could not access their pages or their clients. This brings to the fore the importance of having an alternative online presence in the form of a website or dedicated email address. Such owned media provides a fail-safe in case of these unforeseen events and also provides you with a more credible Internet presence, an e-commerce platform, and a possibility to share your product catalogue, and other relevant information like your location and links to your social media pages.
A .KE domain name is the first step in securing a website or business email. It enables you to have an internet presence that isn’t just based on social media. If you want to build a website, you first need to register your domain name. Domains are useful for business and personal use, for having your own website, online shop, and email address.
The Kenya Network Information Center (KeNIC) is charged with managing the .KE Domains registry and hosts the root DNS servers of the .KE namespace. This means that KeNIC is part of critical internet infrastructure that alot of online services rely on.
Get started with your very own .KE domain on register here
Joseph Marwa,
Head of ICT, KeNIC.