Interruption of Internet Service Friday 7 May 20:30 - 01:00
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On Friday evening we saw unusual activity which resulted in the loss of Internet service to the whole university, including ResNet, from inside the University and we are aware that some internal services were affected by this activity. Staff worked through the evening and service was resumed around 1:00am on Saturday. Information was updated on the IT Services Status page <http://www.bristol.ac.uk/is/news/status/> throughout the incident and over the weekend. There is a permalink to this status item <http://www.wireless.bris.ac.uk/blog/2010/05/07/dns-issue/>
In essence, an unusually large amount of traffic on the University network resulted in asymmetric routing of DNS queries resulting in them not being resolved correctly. After identifying the problem, staff manually reverted the system to symmetric routing and restored service at around 1:00am on Saturday. This meant that sites during this period for which we had no cached DNS information were inaccessible.
Work took place on Monday morning to reduce the likelihood of this type of incident occurring again.
We apologise for the disruption caused.
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Information Services
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/is