Playbook

DNS Outage Playbook

Diagnose resolver issues, TTL propagation, and failover safely.

Query authoritative and public resolvers (8.8.8.8, 1.1.1.1).

Compare responses across regions and ISPs.

Verify NS records and SOA freshness.

Inspect TTL values for A/AAAA/CNAME records.

Confirm no stale or cached records lingering.

Check negative caching for NXDOMAIN issues.

Enable secondary DNS provider or failover records.

Switch traffic to standby region if needed.

Lower TTL after stabilization for future changes.

Query public resolvers

dig example.com @8.8.8.8 +short
dig example.com @1.1.1.1 +short

Check authoritative NS and SOA

dig example.com NS +short
dig example.com SOA +short

Trace resolution path

dig +trace example.com