Connection errors in Asia Pacific region on July 9, 2023

On Sunday, July 9, 2023, early morning UTC time, we observed a high number of DNS resolution failures — up to 7% of all DNS queries across the Asia Pacific region — caused by invalid DNSSEC signatures from Verisign .com and .net Top Level Domain (TLD) nameservers. This resulted in connection errors for visitors of Internet properties on Cloudflare in the region.

The local instances of Verisign’s nameservers started to respond with expired DNSSEC signatures in the Asia Pacific region. In order to remediate the impact, we have rerouted upstream DNS queries towards Verisign to locations on the US west coast which are returning valid signatures.

We have already reached out to Verisign to get more information on the root cause. Until their issues have been resolved, we will keep our DNS traffic to .com and .net TLD nameservers rerouted, which might cause slightly increased latency for the first visitor to domains under .com and .net in the region.

Background

In order to proxy a domain’s traffic through Cloudflare’s network, there are two components involved with respect to the Domain Name System (DNS) from the perspective of a Cloudflare data center: external DNS resolution, and upstream or origin DNS resolution.

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DNS Flag Day 2020

October 1 was this year’s DNS Flag Day. Read on to find out all about DNS Flag Day and how it affects Cloudflare’s DNS services (hint: it doesn’t, we already did the work to be compliant).

What is DNS Flag Day?

DNS Flag Day is an initiative by several DNS vendors and operators to increase the compliance of implementations with DNS standards. The goal is to make DNS more secure, reliable and robust. Rather than a push for new features, DNS flag day is meant to ensure that workarounds for non-compliance can be reduced and a common set of functionalities can be established and relied upon.

Last year’s flag day was February 1, and it set forth that servers and clients must be able to properly handle the Extensions to DNS (EDNS0) protocol (first RFC about EDNS0 are from 1999 - RFC 2671). This way, by assuming clients have a working implementation of EDNS0, servers can resort to always sending messages as EDNS0. This is needed to support DNSSEC, the DNS security extensions. We were, of course, more than thrilled to support the effort, as we’re keen to push DNSSEC adoption forward .

DNS Flag Day 2020

The goal for Continue reading