Who the hell uses root anymore
My ISP caches everything.
Traffic hitting a key internet address look-up server in Europe has spiked over the past 24 hours, reaching loads that are four times higher than normal. It's still not clear what's causing the sharp increase in queries to the K-root, which is maintained by the RIPE Coordination Network Centre. Engineers with the Netherlands- …
Although I guess neither of our theories would explain why the traffic spike only affected one of the root servers. But maybe some idiot has hardcoded a root-server IP address, in the same way that the NTP service has had so much trouble in recent years from cheap home NAT routers.
Maybe I'm looking at the wrong graph on that site or something, but that appears to be a graph of traffic to the L- root server, not the K- one, so at the very least it could benefit from a bit of explaining why this might be relevant to the story.
Yes, that is the L root server and if you look at the weeks range by Node you can see that it has a lot heavier load over the last day and a bit as well, it starts spiking at the end of the 28th.
The spike is in IPv4 traffic for A type queries.
What is interesting is that it appears to be from two subnets responsible.
The 202.0.0.0 subnet (country code AU) as that has gone from a mean query rate of 300 q/s (a week ago) to 1500 q/s this week
The 61.0.0.0 subnet (country code IN) has gone from about 300 q/s to 900 q/s
Also the recursion desired has gone from less than 1000 to just under 4000.