On January 30, 2024, a massive outage occurred in the Russian segment of the Internet, making many sites in the .RU domain inaccessible. According to the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation, the incident was caused by malfunctions in the DNSSEC protocol.
The problems began on Tuesday evening, around 19:30 Moscow time, when users were faced with the inability to open sites in the .RU domain. The outages affected popular services such as Yandex, Zen, Avito, Wildberries, Odnoklassniki, and also caused problems with mobile applications.
The outage affected banking applications, media services and marketplaces, causing disruptions in their operations. It is important to note that sites in the .RU zone were inaccessible outside of Russia.
Representatives of the Coordination Center of the National Internet Domain (CC), Roskomnadzor and the Ministry of Digital Development confirmed the information about the failure and noted that the cause was DNSSEC malfunctions. The technical problems are related to the update of the Domain Name System Security Extension Key.
DNSSEC was effective during the incident, blocking DNS servers that could not authenticate their response. In a statement, the Coordination Center said that while the solution worked properly, it requires refinements over time to correct the identified operational errors.
Access to the sites was restored a few hours after the incident began. Around 21:00 Moscow time, the .RU domain zone was re-signed with a second key, but it took some time to distribute it through providers.
“The incident is still being investigated, but it's already clear that the primary cause of the outage involved a flaw in the software used to generate cryptographic keys,” the Coordinating Center said. They also warned that DNS outages could continue until the Domain Name System is fully updated.
Note
DNS (Domain Name System) is a distributed system whose purpose is to translate symbolic domain names into IP addresses that computers use to identify each other on the Internet. When a Web address is entered into a browser, DNS acts as a translator, converting that address into the corresponding IP address so that the device can communicate with the server hosting the requested Web site. It also plays an important role in processing domain name resolution requests and providing the appropriate IP addresses to ensure the stability of the network.
DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) is a set of DNS extensions designed to improve the security of the Domain Name System. It provides mechanisms to verify the authenticity and integrity of DNS data, thereby reducing the likelihood of various attacks. DNSSEC does this by adding a digital signature to DNS data, ensuring that it can be authenticated and cannot be altered on its way from the source server to the destination host. In this way, DNSSEC increases trust in DNS data and improves the security of the Internet infrastructure.
The root zone of the global Internet was signed with a DNSSEC key in 2010, and the .RU zone was signed with a DNSSEC key in 2012. The National Internet Domain Coordination Center (CC) acts as the administrator of the .RU and .RF domain zones.
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