Just before I got home yesterday there was a major Internet outage. I'm not sure exactly what happened because "NoBody is Talking". When you call the support line the message was really vaugue and stated only that "Houston, We have a problem!"
Usually the service and tech support is great so I never actually spoke with anyone. They already had thier hands full I imagined.
I checked my cable modem and router and by all indications everything was ok by 5:30pm. But my computers wouldn't surf. So I figured it would take a while and all would be fixed. Decided it was best just to go watch the tube.
Just before midnight, I broke out my tools and did a little checking on the state of the Internet. I could ping anyone I could think of. Traceroute was also showing all the routers along the way to several destinations I chose. Pinging by using a website name was also returning ip addresses. One strange thing though is I did see the IP Address for Yahoo dramatically change.
So while DNS appeared to be working...it's possible the routing tables were corrupted. But that doesn't explain why you couldn't surf to a website using the IP Address of the site. Yahoo's IP Address is the same this morning as it was when I last checked around midnight.
Charter maintains more than one DNS server. My guess is that one or more of them got attacked and bad table info may have propagated to several more of them. Just a guess though.
What concerns me most about this is that people who took the plunge and went for VOIP may also have not had phones during the outage. Fortunately though, cell phones don't need IP Addresses or require DNS unless you are surfing over the cell phone. Since I have poor cell service at the house, I'll keep the land line thank you very much!
Oh almost forgot...got up around 2:30 am to do my thing and noticed my Yahoo page finally loaded.