On Thursday, November 28, 2024, our domain registrar, Network Solutions, made an update to our digitaloceanspaces.com domain. The change made at 22:38 UTC (5:38:40PM ET) added an Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) clientHold status code to our domain.
The code prevents DNS resolution until a customer contacts Network Solutions to clear the hold. The impact of the hold resulted in DigitalOcean customers being unable to sign-up/log-in via the Cloud Control Panel at the beginning of the incident and experiencing errors with Spaces buckets and dependent services, such as DigitalOcean Container Registry, App Platform, Functions, Load Balancers, and Mongo Managed Database Backups for the duration of the incident.
Root Cause: Domain registrar erroneously placed a clientHold on the digitaloceanspaces.com domain, impacting DNS resolution and causing an outage.
Impact: Traffic to DigitalOcean products (e.g. Cloud Control Panel, Spaces, App Platform, etc.) began to see intermittent failures between 11/28 22:38 UTC and 04:03 UTC, with the worst failures happening between 03:00 and 04:03 UTC as DNS cache and TTLs began expiring.
Response: DigitalOcean escalated to the domain registrar, as well as Verisign (as the authoritative domain registry for .com domains), to have the clientHold removed.
November 28, 2024 (UTC)
November 29, 2024 (UTC)
DigitalOcean teams are working on multiple types of remediation to prevent a similar incident from happening.
DigitalOcean is working with Network Solutions to understand what happened on their end that resulted in the clientHold being applied to our domain incorrectly.
In addition, we are reviewing other domain registrars as possible new homes for our domains.
Teams are also reviewing our monitoring and alerting to reduce our time to detect incidents related to registrar imposed changes and/or DNS resolution.