3/18 2nd level DNS propagation failure
On 3/18 from 2:48p CST to 4:19p CST, our 2nd level domain names stopped propagating to the world or was spotty. Our company uses CloudFlare's free DNS account for our domain name resolutions. We have used the service for years. We used 3rd party tools to validate that our propagation was not working worldwide or CloudFlare was not answering such queries. It mysteriously started working at 4:19p CST. We are unable to find a root cause. Any ideas?
9 Replies
What domain?
badgermeter.com
Are you still seeing issues with "
sslvpn.badgermeter.com", or was it only happening within the time frame you mentioned with On 3/18 from 2:48p CST to 4:19p CST?
And did you record these issues from certain specific providers?
Or only from this "StatusCake" monitoring tool?
Such monitoring tools, even despite they're meant to be monitoring, can have issues on their (the monitoring tool's, e.g. StatusCake's) side too.We only saw all of our third level names stop being answered during that time period. Statuscake was the first to alert me. I also used other 3rd party DNS propagation tools to check around the world and they also reported this issue.
I'm not able to find any information, that is pointing towards any issues with Cloudflare, within or around the time frame, that you're mentioning.
My suggestion will be to spend the time better on something more important, than digging in to an issue that isn't there any more.
Thanks for helping. Unfortunately, not knowing root cause leaves us at risk for this to recur as we are uncertain if our remedy was valid.
While I do understand your concerns, ... being on the Internet will always a risk in that regard.
The Internet is simply a lot of independent networks, that are being connected together, - sometimes directly, but very often also through third parties, and especially if we're talking about the latter one (e.g. "third parties"), issues can sometimes be really tricky (if even possible) to get to the bottom of.
However, - initially you said:
It mysteriously started working at 4:19p CST.And latest:
as we are uncertain if our remedy was valid.Which one is it, ... and what exact remedy? Making a WHOIS lookup on your domain name, I see:
Updated Date: 2025-03-18T21:08:36ZThat timestamp should translate to ~ 16:08:36 (04:08:36 PM) CST, or roughly 10-11 minutes before things "mysteriously" started to work again. This would indicate that something was changed through your domain registrar, and then pushed up towards the domain registry at that time. I'm not sure why I didn't catch that exact detail before though, - but that's why I'm asking you about what exact remedy you were talking about.
The only action our company took was to pay and overdue bill from February 2024 for around $38 with Cloudflare. It is also possible our admin re-entered the name servers with our registrar GoDaddy to match what CloudFlare wants us to use. Thanks for the feedbacks.