At 3:15pm EST today I got an email from our BES that it had lost its SRP connection.  This happens from time to time and I ignore it as long as it reconnects within a few minutes.  Today it did not.  A quick test revealed that internet connectivity was alive and well, but that external DNS resolution was not.   The OpenDNS servers were unreachable, as was their website.  Oh dear.

I switched the forwarders on our internal DNS servers back to our ISP-provided  servers and we were back in business, but what does this mean for OpenDNS?  I’ve been using them at the corporate level at several of our US sites for over a year with success, but today’s mishap has me wondering if I will continue to do so in the future.  I await more information from OpenDNS and hope they have a good explanation as well as a plan to keep this from happening again in the future.

Update: A rather snide comment (below) from David Ulevitch of OpenDNS suggests that this was a Verizon issue rather than an OpenDNS issue.  Given the general lack of buzz on the internet, I’m inclined to believe it, but shouldn’t this type of issue warrant some sort of communication to the public?  A blog post on the OpenDNS website, or a sticky thread in the forum would go a long way toward getting the word out when problems prevent access to their services, even if said problems are not directly an OpenDNS problem.