No Internet this morning. Citizens Internet Service down for the county. Offline. Nada.

Tech support said the problem was areawide. Not sure what was happening but they were working on it.

Ran some tests. Sites reachable by IP address but not by domain name. That usually means a DNS problem. Perhaps their zone file corrupted during overnight update.

Ran tests with an IP monitor. Yep. IPs found but no domain names.

Called Citizens back. The young lady who answered the tech support line wasn’t impressed.

"We’re checking on it," she said. "Could be anything."

"I dont think so. I think this might be a DNS-specific problem."

"Sir, we have engineers who know about these things."

"I know a few things about Internet networks too. Been working on them since 1994."

"Did they have an Internet in 1994?"

"Yes dear. In fact, even before that."

"Oh. Well we’ll look into it."

She hung up without even saying "thanks." Fifteen minutes later, Citizens Internet came back up.

Our data center in Blacksburg had been running tests all morning. They concluded it was a DNS problem caused by a corrupted zone file. Love it when a plan comes together.