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If this is a test run, this is an amazing early warning for Twitter and the like to immediately start working on contingency plans for election day.

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What can they do? It's not Twitter themselves being DDOS'd, it's a DNS provider. This propagates up the chain to impact both a Tier 1 network and cloud providers, which hits tons of stuff on top of that.

Have a failover DNS provider. Amazon uses Dyn, but also has UltraDNS as a backup, and it's obviously still up. Twitter vs Amazon:

host -t ns twitter.com: ns3.p34.dynect.net, ns4.p34.dynect.net, ns1.p34.dynect.net, ns2.p34.dynect.net.

host -t ns amazon.com: ns3.p31.dynect.net, ns4.p31.dynect.net, ns2.p31.dynect.net, pdns6.ultradns.co.uk, pdns1.ultradns.net, ns1.p31.dynect.net.

Thank you so much for mentioning this. This was my first thought when I heard about all the major enterprise sites affected by the DDoS:

"How do all these major players have singly-homed DNS"?

if you utilize geoip routing features of one provider, it can be difficult to impossible to then ensure repeatable/deterministic behavior on a second provider.

They could distribute instructions for users to follow, E.g. using some permanent working IPs or alternate DNS servers.

Gives them time to test the countermeasures before 11/8

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