As the Apple Turns: Scene 4759: C'mon-- What's In A Name? (6/15/04)

C'mon-- What's In A Name? (6/15/04)

Ah, DNS: that seemingly innocuous 'net mechanism by which human-friendly (well, friendlier, anyway) domain names get translated into the raw numbers-'n'-dots IP addresses that make the virtual world go 'round. It's a great thing, isn't it? After all, Apple would probably get a lot less 'net traffic if people had to type in "17.112.152.32" instead of "www.apple.com." Funny how that works.

That said, is it just us, or are DNS failures of various types some of the most frequent site-killing factors on the planet? For example, not long ago faithful viewer mrmgraphics informed us that eWEEK had gone off the air temporarily because it had failed to renew its domain name. Microsoft suffered a similar humiliation a few years back when it forgot to renew "passport.com," thus nuking the entire Hotmail site. Mac OS Rumors is currently spending its second month in DNS purgatory and can only be reached at its raw IP address of 199.105.116.92. And longtime viewers of this little show will recall a longish stretch a few years back (at the height of our grueling trek through D-S-HELL) when we were broadcasting only from a raw IP as well.

Well, a DNS-related calamity finally appears to have befallen Apple, although luckily only for a couple of hours. And it wasn't that standard bonehead move of "we forgot to renew," either, nor was it actually Apple's fault. Faithful viewer David Poves notes that The Register is reporting that "the Internet domain that Akamai uses to host content-- akadns.net-- disappeared" for two hours early this morning. At least, early this morning in the U.S.-- and smack in the middle of the afternoon in Europe. Right about when hordes of download-crazy Europeans were swarming onto Apple's servers for more information about the new iTMS. Or trying to swarm, anyway, since Apple relies heavily on Akamai technology to serve up its web site, which, by that time, was kaput.

Given that Akamai carries "15 per cent of the Net's traffic," Apple was in good company; the Google, Microsoft, MSN, and Yahoo! sites all got hosed, too. For its part, Akamai is denying that there was a general outage and insists that "Akamai name service continued to function" throughout what it claims was a "large scale international attack on the Internet's infrastructure" which attempted to nuke Yahoo!, Google, and other large search engines. Of course, that doesn't explain why we've got an inbox full of messages all sent during that two-hour period asking us why Apple's web site was down. We suppose it could be a coincidence, with all the iTMS traffic hosing Apple's servers exactly when this alleged "attack" was happening, but a number of the messages we received included error messages that seemed awfully specific to DNS, so who knows?

Whatever. The upshot, of course, is that right when Apple needed its site to be at its peak, it was nowhere to be found, and quite possibly just because of a DNS error of some sort. Sounds to us like maybe we've all just gotten a little too reliant on DNS to save us from having to remember those long, icky numbers. Whaddaya say, people-- back to basics? Henceforth AtAT will be known as and accessed exclusively by the address 204.68.168.161. We'll let you know when the t-shirts are updated.

SceneLink (4759)

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The above scene was taken from the 6/15/04 episode:

June 15, 2004: The iTunes Music Store finally touches down in Europe-- or parts of it, anyway. Meanwhile, the new European stores seem a little light on the merchandise, and Apple's web site vanishes from the face of the 'net right at crunch time, thanks to an alleged DNS problem at Akamai...

Other scenes from that episode:

4757: Finally Here, Mostly Sort Of (6/15/04) What can we say? June is being very good to us this year. Another week, another long-awaited Apple product or service finally coming to market; last week the company finally shipped the speed-bumped Power Macs we'd all been waiting for since Christmas or so, and today, at a high-profile media event in London, Steve ended fourteen solid months of anticipation when he finally unleashed the iTunes Music Store upon Europe, as first reported by faithful viewer Small Paul and confirmed by an Apple press release...
4758: Reading Between The Lines (6/15/04) Meanwhile, the more perceptive AtAT viewers out there may have inferred the significance of only a three-country Euro iTMS launch today and the deferment of a pan-European store until at least October: remember when Apple was allegedly negotiating with the record labels for Europe-wide licensing terms?...

Or view the entire episode as originally broadcast...


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