10 September 2012
This morning, one of the largest domain registrars in world, Godaddy.com, suffered an outage. This outage caused many websites to go down. Goddady provide a service that tells your computer which website you want when you type in spidertracks.com. Without it, your computer doesn't know where to go.
The outage meant that some customers were unable to reach our website, as they didn't know how to get there. Some of you may have been unaffected as the closest name server to you might not have been affected.
Iridium were also affected, and they were unable to send data to our servers for a period. The most notable period was between 1821 and 1900 UTC on the 10th of September.
What are we doing about it? We're going to see if there is an element of redundancy we can create by using alternative domain names for all our services. There is however no guarantee that DNS services won't go offline periodically. Rest assured we're doing everything we can to make our website available to you at all times.
During events like this, we disable the alerting services, as soon as we know about the outage, so that we don't generate false positives. When the system comes back online, it processes everything and can retrospectively identify if you're having an issue whilst flying - alerts will still be generated but they will be a bit late. In this morning's case, they would have been up to 25 minutes later than during optimal conditions.
The other thing to note, is that although the twitter user @AnonymousOwn3r has claimed responsibility for Godaddy's outage, there has been no attempt to hack spidertracks servers. Our server's integrity has not been compromised during this.
If you have questions, suggestions, or would just like to talk about this, please get in touch with me. My email address is james@spidertracks.co.nz, mobile +64 21 84 83 80, and my twitter name is @jamesmccarthynz. You can also tweet @stlsupport, or email support@spidertracks.co.nz if you're still not getting to our sites.
I'm sorry that this has happened, for the operational and safety concerns, as well as any anxiety it's caused.
Thanks and regards,
James McCarthy
