IP: Four of the 13 root servers used by Network Solutions

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Four of the 13 root servers used by Network Solutions to manage global 
Internet traffic partially failed for a brief period Wednesday night due to 
technical difficulties. The computers -- one in Tokyo, one in California 
and two in Virginia -- failed to serve requests for links to Web sites 
ending in ".com" suffix for a little over an hour. Web addresses ending in 
other suffixes were unaffected. While an e-mail distributed Wednesday by 
Network Solutions VP Mark Rippe described the event as "a *MAJOR, MAJOR* 
incident", an NSI spokesman later insisted the failure was simply "a minor 
hiccup invisible to end users." Minor hiccup indeed. The last time 
something like this happened, July of 1997, it was seven root servers that 
failed, disrupting much of the traffic on the Net for a few hours.