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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.

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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.

The Latest

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...