This past Tuesday the 22nd I was witness to a widespread DNS poisoning problem in China, whereby a lot of DNS queries were all returning the same IP address, 65.49.2.178. Our websites became unavailable for most of our customers in China, as with many other websites. The major difficulty that we had with one of our websites is that we use Akamai's CDN, and Akamai's servers within China were unable to reach our origin server in London - so it originally appeared as if Akamai was having an issue before unofficial news surfaced that there was a larger problem going on. I have two questions for anyone: 1) I've found quite a bit of unofficial news [1] [2] on what happened, but does anyone know what *actually* happened? The only official news from the government that I can find says, "It was probably a cyberattack, but really, we don't know." [3] 2) As a website & network operator who strives to keep their product always available, is there anything I can actually do to prevent from this in the future? The most fun question I think everyone would love to know is - does anyone from Hurricane Electric have a throughput graph showing the traffic surge caused by this? It must be epic. Cheers, Patrick 1: http://gizmodo.com/most-of-chinas-web-traffic-wound-up-at-a-tiny-wyoming-150... 2: http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/01/massive-internet-failure-caused-great-f... 3: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2014-01/23/c_133067744.htm -- Patrick van Staveren Head of IT, APAC & Global Head of IT Infrastructure Mintel Group Ltd. <http://www.mintel.com/> PNVS-ARIN <pre><font size="1" face="Verdana"> Mintel Group Limited | 25th Floor Broad Silver International Building 398 Huaihai Zhong Road | Shanghai, P.R. China 200020 Contact details for our offices can be found at <a href="http://www.mintel.com/office-locations" target="_blank">http://www.mintel.com/office-locations</a>. This email and any attachments may include content that is confidential, privileged, or otherwise protected under applicable law. Unauthorised disclosure, copying, distribution, or use of the contents is prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this email in error, including without appropriate authorisation, then please reply to the sender about the error and delete this email and any attachments.</font>