Start Date (1): June 18th 2019 at 06:27 UTC
End Date (1): June 18th 2019 at 21:25 UTC
Start Date (2): June 18th 2019 at 12:56 UTC
Start Date (2): June 19th 2019 at 13:24 UTC
Problem Location: Packet Website
Problem Description: (1) The Packet website was unavailable, (2) Google Mail responds NXDOMAIN for email sent to Packet.com
Outage Details
At 06:27 UTC a DDoS by an unidentified botnet was directed at the Packet WWW Origin site. When it was clear the attack would not abate, we black holed the site address and changed the IP of our WWW origin to restore service.
The sites origin IP was exposed because it’s IP was the packet.com and packet.net apex (A record at the domain root) address. An attempt by a Packet Engineer to replace the packet.com A record with a CNAME resulted in a violation of RFC1034 (section 3.6.2) that states, if a CNAME record is present at a node, no other data should be present. Google’s internal DNS caches ignored the MX records for packet.com causing all Google GMail and GSuite customers to get an NXDOMAIN error when sending email. Although we quickly rectified the issue and made numerous attempts to escalate a cache flush to Google, the problem only resolved 24 hours when presumably the Google caches flushed.
Packet has replaced its A record with a Fastly supplied Anycast IP and additional ACL’s have been put in place to protect our origin server from future attacks.
Customer Impact
The initial DDoS only impacted the public website, the subsequent Google caching problem impacted all email to packet.com for a period of 24 hours.