Something ate Google's 8.8.8.8 at about eight in Asia's evening

Those who worry about cloud resilience have another incident to point at and frown, after Google's public domain name system (DNS) servers at the attractive IP addresses of 8.8.8.8. and 8.8.4.4 went down for Asian users yesterday.

Google offers its public DNS servers out of the goodness of its heart, and also because the touted features of extra speed and greater security advance its mission to get more people doing more stuff online more often. The Chocolate Factory also tries to be impartial and says the service does not “block, filter, or redirect DNS responses for commercial purposes”.

Network operators quite like that combination, not least because it saves them from having to run their own DNS servers. Plenty of individuals also like the service, as it is often faster than ISPs' DNS.

Rather a lot of consternation was therefore to be found on Monday evening when, at around eight PM in much of Asia, the service wobbled and then fell.

The Australian Network Operators Group mailing list lit up on Monday evening with reports that the service was down, as it was rather bad news for the list's network admin members.

Tweets like the one below can be found in Asian alphabets from India to Japan, as Asian users of the service also found they could no longer access web sites.

そういやDNSよくわからんまま8.8.8.8に変えてたんだったな…

— アゴエラ (@agoera) October 13, 2014

Googler Yunhong Gu acknowledged the outage and said it ran for just thirty minutes.

The Reg suspects its effects were felt for a little longer, judging by the volume of disgruntled Tweets on the matter.

But let's get back to the topic of cloud resilience: Google's public DNS is offered on an as-is basis, and the FAQ for the service states “We are not providing an SLA for this service at this time.”

If you make the choice to use the service at home, fair enough. But it's known that Google's DNS servers are the target of all manner of attacks. Those who rely on free, unsupported, services have surely had enough warnings that their optimism may be misplaced. ®