If you were one of billions of frustrated users of Facebook who weren’t able to access their accounts Monday, rest assured in knowing that downtime is a thing of the distant past and the mega-social media platform is back online. End users can now relax knowing that the brush fire has been extinguished. Remarkably, the nearly seven-hour outage could not be attributed to the deluge of recent high-profile attacks on government, enterprise, and educational servers throughout the world.

In the workplace, certain web pages can be a distraction for employee productivity—or worse, a disruption. If you’re a managed services provider (MSP), your customers may be interested in finding a way to control the types of websites their employees can access during the workday. One viable option for them to utilize is a DNS block to restrict access to certain web addresses on a given server. This article will help you understand what DNS block is, who uses it, and how it works.

You may have come across the word "nameserver" if you maintain your own website. You may, however, have no true idea of what one is or how it works. Knowing a little about the “nameserver” concept can help you manage your website. Simply said, nameservers help browsers in establishing links between URLs and websites. They're essential since we'd have to memorize IP addresses to visit websites if we didn't have them.

The Domain Name System, DNS for short, is one of the most important protocols on the internet, and yet relatively few people understand its purpose. DNS is a protocol which governs how computers exchange data online. Its purpose, simply stated, is to match names with numbers, helping to convert memorable domain names (such as statuscake.com), into an IP address (such as 8.8.8.8 for Google.com) that your browser can use. DNS is essentially a map or a phone book of the internet.

At Catchpoint, our award-winning support team aims to be a partner, not just a gateway to the tool. Earlier this month when UltraDNS, a major DNS provider, went down, they found themselves faced with nine support tickets within one hour. Our customers were experiencing outages on their websites and online services. They needed urgent help from Catchpoint in understanding what was causing the disruption, so they could quickly resolve the situation.

The Domain Name System (DNS) is at the core of the engine that keeps the internet running. We have explained how DNS works and why it is critical to the functioning of the internet in our Synthetic Monitoring Guide. The DNS resolution relies on various components, such as the DNS resolvers, name servers, authoritative servers, and zone files, to function properly and the process typically takes milliseconds to complete.

On Wednesday 17th March, globally used DNS provider Network Solutions experienced the dreaded downtime we all hope to avoid. Starting at 4am Eastern time and continuing through to Thursday 18th with still no resolution, it’s affected thousands of people across the world. Network Solutions are the 4th biggest domain registrar in the world, with nearly 7 million users worldwide.