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July 16, 2008

wunderground.com DNS problems today

anyone who relies on wunderground.com for weather data (and that is, seemingly, everybody) is scratching their heads today, wondering what the hell happened to the site. One minute pages come up blank; the next they kind of load, but with images broken. Google blog search (thanks D for that pointer) shows people who can and cannot get to the mobile version, the RSS feeds, etc.

i was able to get through to their home page long enough to submit a problem ticket, and they responded within minutes:

-----Original Message-----
From: Weather Underground, Inc [mailto:kayako@wunderground.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2008 10:35 AM
To: Lisa Linn
Subject: [#OWX-]: What's happening to weather underground?

Hello,

Weather Underground is currently experiencing a problem with name
resolution (DNS) to the site. Roughly half of site visitors are taken
to a "Site Under Construction" or an error page when they try
wunderground.com.

We are working feverishly to solve this problem.

In the meantime, you can visit www.weatherunderground.com which still
works.

Sincerely,
Weather Underground Staff


Thank you for your support!

Weather Underground, Inc
http://www.wunderground.com/

Ticket Details
===================
Ticket ID: OWX-
Category: General

So, if you were wondering, that's the story. Well, part of the story. I'm sure the cause of the DNS problems will eventually be revealed but at least the site hasn't been yoinked with no warning.

ETA:

a co-worker dug this out of the blog search:

This was posted at 8:06 pm last night: Straight from John Celenza at WeatherUnderground:

---

Man I wish we had updates on time.

Basically the folks who control our domain registration made a MAJOR
mistake today and broke DNS resolution of our site by pointing DNS
lookups to the wrong name service.

We'll be up definitely after the 45 hour timeout period when root name
servers will again attempt to lookup and store Wunderground.com.
However, we are working with our registrar to find a MUCH faster
solution.

Posted by lisa at July 16, 2008 10:46 AM

Comments

I'm glad you posted this. I didn't notice any problems myself, but now at least I know someone uses the Weather Underground other than myself. :)

It's tempting to say that the described problem shouldn't have resulted in a user-visible DNS issue, but I'm not going to say that. :)

Posted by: Joseph H. Vilas on July 16, 2008 12:12 PM

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