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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.

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E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

Image
Broadcom

The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

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Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

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Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Imagine a future where software, once a complex obstacle, becomes a natural extension of daily workflow — an intuitive, seamless experience that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This future is no longer a distant vision but a reality being crafted by the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence ...

Enterprise data sprawl already challenges companies' ability to protect and back up their data. Much of this information is never fully secured, leaving organizations vulnerable. Now, as GenAI platforms emerge as yet another environment where enterprise data is consumed, transformed, and created, this fragmentation is set to intensify ...

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