On Wednesday afternoon, Eastern Time, the well-known remote video conferencing software Zoom experienced a large-scale, global outage. When the outage occurred, users using Zoom encountered prompts such as being unable to access this site or checking Zoom.us for spelling errors.
Later investigation showed that the error had nothing to do with Zoom itself, but an error in the domain name it used, namely the Zoom.us registry, which caused the domain name to be suspended. The registry for the US domain name is GoDaddy Register.
The Zoom domain name is hosted on the registrar Markmonitor platform. An investigation revealed that there was a communication error between the platform and the GoDaddy registration center, causing the GoDaddy registration center to incorrectly close the resolution of the Zoom.us domain name.
Although the problem has been resolved, Zoom, Markmonitor and GoDaddy have not disclosed the specific circumstances of the so-called communication error, and what kind of communication error can cause a domain name registry to directly stop resolving a specific domain name.
Another interesting lesson here is not to put your domain name status page on the main domain name and your own service. A joke circulating in the industry is that a platform should host the status log on a competitor platform to prevent users from being able to check the logs if their own platform goes down.
Zoom encountered a similar error during this outage. The Zoom status page used its own subdomain name status.Zoom.us. Therefore, after the domain name was stopped from resolving, users could not check the current specific situation. What is worse is that Zoom enterprise customers and Zoom account managers also communicate through Zoom. Therefore, after Zoom hangs up, customers cannot contact the account manager and cannot understand what the problem is.
In order to prevent domain name issues, GitHub separately registered githubstatus.com to display status logs. However, this log page seems to be hosted in GitHub's own data center. I wonder if the status page can be continuously accessed if there is an extreme situation in which the entire data center fails.
Note: GoDaddy is a domain name registrar, and GoDaddy Register is the registry for US domain names. They are affiliated companies but belong to different organizations.
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