Early Tuesday morning, we began to receive reports of outages on autoecat.com. These outages were intermittent and limited to specific customer sites. Upon review of our internal monitoring logs, we discovered a 13 minute outage overnight on Monday. Beyond this short outage, our monitors were not reporting any additional issues.
Initial problems from Tuesday morning were marked as resolved, and no more reports were received.
On Wednesday, we received a number of reports that the outages had returned and, in fact, had continued during Tuesday afternoon. Reports were, again, intermittent and localized to specific sites. Further effort was put in to discovering the underlying problem, and a similarity was discovered. All reports were being sent in from users running on a Shaw internet service.
Investigation into the issue found that one of the primary Shaw DNS servers was intermittently unresponsive. This caused the user’s PC to be unable to resolve the autoecat.com domain.
A solution was implemented to help the user’s PC cache the autoecat domain results for a longer duration that normal and this appears to have resolved the symptoms of the issue at Shaw.