Dyn, a DNS and internet infrastructure company, posts about DNS, dynamic DNS, traffic management, and internet routing.
HN commenters mention Dyn as a dynamic DNS provider and for its DynECT service and active failover, which supports CNAME failover.
Why do you feel it was dyn? I got that email and didn't remember it referring to anything in particular. I just took another look and here is the copy:
"In today's demand-driven marketing world, getting email into the inbox and sending that email is as crucial as turning on the lights in the morning. Social media is awesome, but when it comes to the most trusted form of communication with customers, prospects and fans, email wins hands down.
See that graphic above? That's a screenshot from about an hour ago, a visual representation of where emails sent through our servers are being read at that instant around the world. At a billion+ messages sent a month, there's no better time to move your email delivery services to Dyn.
We've relaunched our packages, introducing an entry-level option for just $3 per month -- roughly the amount of a large coffee. Isn't your transactional email program worth more than that?
It's time to deliver through Dyn. Sign up now. Send today. Be successful tomorrow."
Explain why you feel that a) dyn sent this in reaction to the "situation" and b) even if they did how this was a bad thing.
By the way here is the dyn.com blog post I'm not seeing anything there that dovetails and makes them the company the OP is referring to:
http://dyn.com/blog/email-delivery-dynect-deliverability-scalability-iaas-no-downtime/
DynECT Email (http://dyn.com/enterprise-email/dynect-email)
Many of our clients rely on email to drive their revenue, as that may be the case for you folks as well. We solve this very specific problem by ensuring delivery of their email to the intended destination (the INBOX!). We are able to ensure deliverability of large email quantities by working with hundreds of ISPs, monitoring bounces, improving and maintaining sender scores and many other specifics with a product called SmartMTA. Any incremental increase in your email delivery rate has a direct impact on your bottom line.
There are many vendors who do a great job helping folks manage lists, content and templates, but there is nobody out there who does as good a job as us ensuring delivery and providing analytics. We are working with over 1,000 Enterprise Level Accounts, including Twitter, Netflix, Groupon, Pandora, Photobucket, Mashable, Zappos and many more. We currently have clients that do anywhere from 50,000 emails to 400+ million emails a month! And did I mention no downtime since our inception?
Feel free to ping me at acaron@dyn.com to chat about your business needs!
As briefly mentioned in the article, SOPA proposed DNS-level blacklisting against copyright-infringing websites. But the fact that you are able to choose what DNS server you use almost guarantees that at some point someone would set up a DNS server outside of the US that would bypass these blocks anyways.
Savvy users could simply bypass a SOPA-enabled recursive DNS server by pointing their DNS settings to an off-shore recursive DNS server... What would happen to users if an infringer decided to setup a “free, non-SOPA” recursive DNS server for users to use – one that additionally hijacked legitimate banking, ecommerce and business websites, too? [1]
[1] https://dyn.com/blog/sopa-breaking-dns-parasite-stop-online-piracy/
Depends on how many PoPs they have. Looks like they have 4 easter US.[0] If they are seeing large attacks that Krebs saw a few weeks ago, that could certainly be enough to take down one or two, and then causing redirected traffic to take down the other two.
I used to work for a DNS/DDoS provider, and this was a very real problem. Leave the PoPs that are being affected out, or risk overloading the other PoPs by overloading real traffic.
Before moving the other traffic, you also have to worry about blocking the DDoS traffic otherwise you're just redirecting them to the other PoPs. Mitigating DDoS attacks are not fun, and hard to block.
[0]http://dyn.com/dns/network-map/
How to implement a multi-CDN strategy (streamroot.io): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18399523
Etsy implementing multiple CDN (7 years ago, the CDNcontrol project looks abandoned): https://speakerdeck.com/ickymettle/integrating-multiple-cdn-providers-our-experience-at-etsy https://dyn.com/blog/speaking-with-etsy-about-multi-cdns-and-dns/
Basically: you can try to keep a low TTL DNS, but it'll be more DNS traffic, and 5-10% of traffic takes forever to cut over because nobody respects TTL. Worst case you have just as much down time as before, best case most of your traffic is recovered in a few minutes.
Of course it's still hackable. There's nothing stopping you from advertising specific prefixes and hijacking all of Youtube traffic globally.
https://dyn.com/blog/pakistan-hijacks-youtube-1/
Oh wait, that happened almost a decade ago, and there's been no fundamental change to the protocol to protect against that. Except, if you keep something like that in place persistently, nobody will want to peer with you.
* My understanding is that the global hijack was accidental. Pakistan Telecom just wanted to block Youtube traffic internally, and they used a bad mechanism for doing that. Oops.