On Saturday, December 2nd, 2023, my website went down for almost 30 hours, which is longer than it was supposed to last. Now you might think that it was a simple mistake on my end. But it was actually a bigger issue than it really was.
To explain this, I'll need to get technical.
The problem lies within the DNS servers. (for those unfamiliar, DNS servers are what allow the internet to work properly, a more technical explanation can be found here)
My DNS servers were accidentally taken offline due to a misunderstanding at my DNS provider, when they tried to mass-deploy a DNS server update that later failed, causing the DNS servers to go down for all domains using their DNS servers, not just mine. This happened at 8 AM PT on December 2nd.
About 6 hours later my DNS provider notified me that they were trying to get all the DNS servers back up and operational for all domains at once, but the next day (December 3rd), they said that they had to put up the DNS servers for each domain one at a time, and they were going to prioritize the more popular domains first, followed by TLD (top level domain, for example, .com) and then alphabetically. This put my domain towards the middle of the list, rather then at the end, due to my domain being a .com domain.
This was not a problem for my website since it is a personal blog, and not a company website.
By 4:30 PM PT, my domain's DNS servers were back up and running, and by 7:30 PM PT, all DNS servers were back up and running.
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