QJ may have seemed down all day, but we were hard at work churning out the latest (and not-so-latest) news this side of the afterlife. When Joecool mentioned something about DNS attacks, we were all on the alert.

As Joecool mentioned on our comments for the downtime:

Not to mention today (rather yesterday now that i'm saying this), there was a huge attack on 3 out of 13 of the root DNS servers that run the internet, the largest global internet attack since 2002.

The attacks appeared to target UltraDNS, the company that operates servers managing traffic for Web sites ending in "org" and some other suffixes, experts said. Officials with NeuStar Inc., which owns UltraDNS, confirmed only that it had observed an unusual increase in traffic.

Among the targeted "root" servers that manage global Internet traffic were ones operated by the Defense Department and the Internet's primary oversight body.