TalkTalk Users Hit by DNS Woes on WordPress and Imgur Sites UPDATE

Some of TalkTalk’s broadband ISP customers in the UK appear to be suffering from a Domain Name System (DNS) or routing bug, which has been obstructing their access to web pages and images on the popular WordPress (blogs) and Imgur (picture sharing) websites since the weekend (other sites are also affected).

Officially the ISP only began acknowledging that a problem existed on Sunday morning, when they finally updated their service status page. Nevertheless subscribers have been reporting that the disruption actually began on Saturday and still has not been fixed.

The DNS system (server) is responsible for translating IP addresses into human readable domain names (e.g. ISPreview.co.uk) and then back again. In the past such systems were fairly simple, although today ISPs are required to do all sorts of complicated filtering (blocking / censorship) of website content and sometimes things do go wrong.

In the past we’ve seen plenty of similar problems from all of the major ISPs, most recently including Vodafone that has also been troubled by a long running problem with access to Imgur (here).

Service Status Statement

We’re aware that some customers are unable to access the imgur.com website and some WordPress sites.

We’d like to apologise for the inconvenience caused and assure you our engineers are investigating this issue

Initially support agents were advising customers to try a free DNS alternative instead (Google Public DNS, OpenDNS etc.), although many of those affected have reported that this did not resolve the problem. Instead the only way around it has been to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) service, so as to entirely avoid TalkTalk’s internet filtering systems.

Meanwhile TalkTalk’s network team have been asking some subscribers to help them identify the faulty DNS server by running this command under MS Windows (command prompt):

nslookup -q=txt -class=CHAOS id.server 79.79.79.79

Naturally the ISP’s twitter feed is full of angry subscribers. We have requested a comment from TalkTalk and are awaiting their response.

UPDATE 1:23pm

In a brief update the ISP now says, “We’re pleased to confirm that earlier issues with image sharing sites has now been resolved.”