Google Botches DNS Update

A glitch in the DNS records for the well-known search engine caused browser lookups to fail for a period of time.

The problem occurred Saturday evening in the US, where attempts to reach the Google search site began to fail. Similar attempts to access the company’s Gmail free e-mail service or display content from its AdSense service also failed.

A glitch in the company’s DNS entries were the culprit. About one in four lookups for Google sites were failing due to the problem.

The issue was resolved quickly on Google’s end, but other nameservers on the Internet took a little longer to retrieve the updated DNS record from Google and purge the faulty entries.

This type of problem usually results from human error, though external issues like a DNS cache poisoning attack can cause the same problems.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.