Cogent's statement on c.root-servers.org:

"2024‑05‑23 - On May 21 at 15:30 UTC the c-root team at Cogent Communications was informed that the root zone as served by c-root had ceased to track changes from the root zone publication server after May 18. Analysis showed this to have been caused by an unrelated routing policy change whose side effect was to silence the relevant monitoring systems. No production DNS queries went unanswered by c-root as a result of this outage, and the only impact was on root zone freshness. Root zone freshness as served by c-root was fully restored on May 22 at 16:00 UTC."

Edit to add:

This was mentioned on Tuesday on the dns-operations list:

https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2024-May...

Internet stability is not threatened by the loss of a single root server, it’s not even a blip on the radar. In fact most people wouldn’t even notice if they all went down for a few minutes, DNS operators do not actually use these servers directly. You can even run your own if you are crazy enough.

Everyone likes to meme on DNS but it’s literally designed to make these servers as unimportant as possible. It’s a really well designed system that will probably be around as long as humans exist.

Not surprising behavior from Cogent, who to this day refuses to peer with Hurricane Electric's IPv6 network [see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Electric and related footnotes].

If it takes 3 days to be noticed by an outside party, I dare say that whatever caused the issue probably isn't the first problem to fix.

Honestly the issue here isn't that they let the zone get stale. The root zone doesn't change that much. So a couple of TLDs had to hold off on making changes, who cares.

The issue here is that they didn't notice until someone with a direct contact at Cogent emailed them to tell them.

A corollary to that issue is the fact that the last news item is the same thing: they failed to get updates and their monitoring failed to tell them. Supposedly their monitoring was fixed then, in 2019. Why should we believe it's any more fixed now?

Cogent sucks. Their routing issues are so common and often severe. I seriously don't know how that org still exists.

Here is one glitch that seems to be related that still is not fixed:

https://www.indilib.org/forum/general/14691-indilib-org-site...

The glitch began on the 18th and is now in the situation where some users can and others cannot access the site. I, myself, cannot access the site six days later, when connected via my network wifi router (ISP is Cox Communications), but can, if instead I connect to the Hotspot on my IPhone(AT&T). Traceroutes fail in either case, continually, at the server 198.207.200.70 (which does not appear to be owned by cogent).

What, if anything, can an end-user such as myself do in such a situation. Where can such an end-user send a report that might lead to a fix? I assume the owners of the indilib.org site are trying whatever they can, but I have no idea what their reporting chain might be.

Probably accidentially firewalled the DNS-XFER/IXFR port for a few days.

I know this similar scenario happened to our lab setup of root servers.

Don’t tell Andy Jenkinson about this.

The biggest issue here is a total lack of monitoring of root zone sync among all 1840+ root server instance, where an issue is detected accidentally by a random dude.

Huge oversight from ICAAN and ARIN. I know they are behind anycast, but each server must also have an unicast address for management.

clickbait headline