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2/3 Of Fortune 50 Companies are at Risk of Being Taken off the

Internet – Is Your Company Too?

by Angelique Medina, Senior Product Marketing Manager, ThousandEyes

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 – Dyn, in their case. 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 the Dyn 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.

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.

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