Customers Report Neustar UltraDNS Outage

An UltraDNS outage late yesterday, May 6, 2021, was reported by customers. Users attempted to reach out to Neustar UltraDNS through Twitter to find out the root cause. The service disruption appears to have occurred around 6:00 p.m. CST, based on a screenshot that Twitter user, Robert Suh, posted of the DNS provider’s status update in regards to the blackout.

UltraDNS has since removed the status report from their portal. Their status dashboard does not currently show indications of a performance issue. The status update was made to their portal that only customers have access to. This interruption of service comes just a few days after Network Solutions and Register.com experienced a multiday-outage.

Neustar DNS Server Down

Many companies rely on Neustar DNS servers for their mission-critical services. According to Alexa, UltraDNS manages top domains such as NFL, Expedia, hotels.com, NameCheap, Credit One Bank, and Equifax. When UltraDNS has a “service degradation in authoritative DNS resolution,” or “outage,” it is not just the DNS provider that suffers. Their clientele and their customers are affected. 

For instance, COVID-19 led to pandemic-related fraud cases, and many people rely on Equifax to assist in those instances. Many banks rely on UltraDNS as their single DNS provider and if they go down, customers don’t have access to their savings, checking accounts, mortgage loans, or even credit accounts. 

DNS Outage Solutions

There are solutions that can help organizations avoid outages. Secondary DNS provides the domain with redundancy to ensure services remain online. This acts as a lifeline in the event of a service disruption with the primary DNS provider. Other services such as Load Balancing and Failover keep traffic balanced across multiple servers and if one server is down, the queries are directed to another server to avoid outages. 

Related articles:

https://constellix.com/news/taking-accountability-of-outages

https://constellix.com/news/dns-outage-takes-down-microsoft

https://constellix.com/news/google-dns-outage-affects-millions-of-users-globally

https://constellix.com/news/network-solutions-still-suffering-a-multi-hour-dns-outage