Two-Thirds of Fortune 50 Companies Are at Risk of Being Taken Off the Internet – Is Your Company Too?

Archana Kesavan

Two years ago, Amazon, Comcast, Twitter and Netflix were effectively taken off the Internet for multiple hours by a DDoS attack because they all relied on a single DNS provider. Can it happen again?

According to the 2018 ThousandEyes Global DNS Performance Report, 68% of the top 50 companies in the Fortune 500 and 72% of companies on the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 are still at risk. Two years after that DDoS attack, you'd think digital companies would have learned their lesson, but apparently not so.

According to the report, many of the biggest companies on the planet – as well as 44% of the top 25 SaaS providers – don't have a fallback DNS server option. That means that a single outage or DDoS attack could completely take their businesses off the Internet.

Many of the biggest companies on the planet don't have a fallback DNS server option

DNS is the "phone book of the Internet." It's the first step in how humans connect to online brands because it's the Internet infrastructure that translates human-readable domain names to routable IP addresses. Without DNS, there is no digital experience. It's the least appreciated aspect of delivering online user experience, and the most overlooked chink in an enterprise's armor.

Even digitally mature organizations can get DNS wrong by not following best practices around resiliency. It's also a complex topic that most networking professionals haven't spent enough time to understand.

The DNS expert community is select, but the need for awareness of DNS has grown as more businesses than ever rely on digital experiences in their revenue generation. According to Gartner, CIOs report that 37% of their revenues will be have a digital footprint by 2020. If DNS is the first step in every digital experience, than not getting that step right can be incredibly costly.

As for the lack of enterprise DNS resiliency, consider this analogy. Most IT professionals would never consider building a data center without backup power or redundant telecom or Internet connections. Further, most know that redundant connectivity isn't truly redundant unless there is diversity of physical cable routes and facilities. But too many are just using a single DNS service. If that DNS "power" gets cut, it doesn't matter how much you spend on your CDN, your regional cloud hosting, etc. Your brand will be offline and you'll be scrambling.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

Two-Thirds of Fortune 50 Companies Are at Risk of Being Taken Off the Internet – Is Your Company Too?

Archana Kesavan

Two years ago, Amazon, Comcast, Twitter and Netflix were effectively taken off the Internet for multiple hours by a DDoS attack because they all relied on a single DNS provider. Can it happen again?

According to the 2018 ThousandEyes Global DNS Performance Report, 68% of the top 50 companies in the Fortune 500 and 72% of companies on the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 are still at risk. Two years after that DDoS attack, you'd think digital companies would have learned their lesson, but apparently not so.

According to the report, many of the biggest companies on the planet – as well as 44% of the top 25 SaaS providers – don't have a fallback DNS server option. That means that a single outage or DDoS attack could completely take their businesses off the Internet.

Many of the biggest companies on the planet don't have a fallback DNS server option

DNS is the "phone book of the Internet." It's the first step in how humans connect to online brands because it's the Internet infrastructure that translates human-readable domain names to routable IP addresses. Without DNS, there is no digital experience. It's the least appreciated aspect of delivering online user experience, and the most overlooked chink in an enterprise's armor.

Even digitally mature organizations can get DNS wrong by not following best practices around resiliency. It's also a complex topic that most networking professionals haven't spent enough time to understand.

The DNS expert community is select, but the need for awareness of DNS has grown as more businesses than ever rely on digital experiences in their revenue generation. According to Gartner, CIOs report that 37% of their revenues will be have a digital footprint by 2020. If DNS is the first step in every digital experience, than not getting that step right can be incredibly costly.

As for the lack of enterprise DNS resiliency, consider this analogy. Most IT professionals would never consider building a data center without backup power or redundant telecom or Internet connections. Further, most know that redundant connectivity isn't truly redundant unless there is diversity of physical cable routes and facilities. But too many are just using a single DNS service. If that DNS "power" gets cut, it doesn't matter how much you spend on your CDN, your regional cloud hosting, etc. Your brand will be offline and you'll be scrambling.

Related Links

Hot Topics

Related Vendors

The Latest

Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How AI Becomes an Operational Advantage

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Closing the Gap in Modern Tech and the Tools Meant to Monitor Them

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 23: NetOps Labor Shortage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Why FinOps Rewrote Its Mission and What It Signals for Technology Management

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Clearing the Path to AI: Why Vendor Consolidation Matters Now

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Cold Data, Hot Problem: Why AI Is Rewriting Enterprise Storage Strategy

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

Observability at a Crossroads: AI, Economics, Complexity and the Enduring Power of Open Source

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

Explainability Is the New Battleground in AI-Powered Observability

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

Empowering the Human Side of the Autonomous IT Age

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI Scale Is Outpacing Infrastructure - and IT Leaders Are Running Out of Time

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.