Facebook and the services owned by the social media giant have been hard hit by a massive outage this afternoon that has seen all of those services down for almost four hours at this point. Caught up in that mess, though, is Google’s 8.8.8.8 DNS service, which has slowed down amid the Facebook outage.
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Photo: @FindikKahve
Turkish citizens, who found access to Twitter blocked yesterday in an apparent attempt by prime minister Recep Erdoğan to stem the spread of corruption allegations against him, have been able to work around the block by switching to Google’s public DNS service.
The Turkish government blocked access to Twitter by requiring local ISPs to change the DNS entries so that twitter.com could no longer be reached. As soon as the method of blocking access was discovered, a campaign started to spread the word that it could be circumvented by changing network settings to use Google’s DNS servers at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (update: a comment suggests the Turkish government is blocking these addresses too) …
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Google has announced on their Official Google Blog that Google DNS is now the world’s largest DNS service, processing a whopping 70 billion requests a day. Google’s DNS efforts make for faster load times if you choose to use the service. Google describes DNS as, “If you had to look up hundreds or thousands of phone numbers every day, you’d want a directory that was fast, secure and correct.”
We launched Google Public DNS in December 2009 to help make the web faster for everyone. Today, we’re no longer an experimental service. We’re the largest public DNS service in the world, handling an average of more than 70 billion requests a day.
Google also dropped word that they currently have over 10 million users using the service. 70% of Google DNS’ traffic comes from outside of the United States, with key markets being North America, South America, Europe, and an emerging Asia.
Not using Google DNS? Check out how.
