[LINK] DNS outage?

[Paul Brooks]

Jan Whitaker wrote:
> At 11:24 PM 28/07/2009, Paul Brooks you wrote:
>   
>> Road traffic needs out-of-band notification, as it has no inherent
>> in-band rerouting mechanism - drivers unaware of a problem will continue
>> to drive into the trouble zone.
>> The Internet has BGP-4.
>>     
>
> What ever happened to the Internet rerouting itself so it 'can't be 
> broken'? Or was that always a myth? I thought its resilience was one 
> of its big selling points.
>   
On a large scale, that was the reference to BGP-4 - which is the routing 
protocol between  networks that steers traffic around broken 
links/routers, generally updating the global routing table within a few 
seconds.
This does depend on there being a different path for traffic to be 
re-routed onto. In practice if you happen to be very close to the cause 
of the break (or your intended traffic source/sink is), there may not be 
another path to steer traffic onto.

None of which has anything to do with a DNS outage in the subject line 
though.