Yesterday AT&T found it’s DNS infrastructure the victim of a distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) which crippled it’s service.
The multi-hour attack began Wednesday morning West Coast time and at the time of this writing, eight hours later, does not appear to have been mitigated.
“Due to a distributed denial of service attack attempting to flood our Domain Name System servers in two locations, some AT&T business customers are experiencing intermittent disruptions in service,” an AT&T spokesman told IDG News Service by email. “Restoration efforts are underway and we apologize for any inconvenience to our customers.”
DNS is the system that allows users to type in http://google.com and receive the requested page from Google’s webserver, rather than having to remember a litany of meaningless IP addresses. As a result, users of AT&Ts DNS servers were unable to perform their essential business functions.
