NIH.gov DNS servers down, making PubMed, BLAST, etc. unreachable [fixed]

https://www.nslookup.io/domains/www.nih.gov/dns-records/#authoritative

by raphman • 1 year ago

494 341 1 year ago

raphman11• 1 year ago

It seems someone shut down all NIH DNS servers. Right now the NIH website, PubMed and BLAST are up, but not resolvable.

Cloudflare's 1.0.0.1 DNS resolver seems to still have cached the records. Google and most others I tried did not. This probably explains why some people on social media could access the sites while others couldn't.

Workaround via /etc/hosts :

  156.40.212.210 nih.gov
  96.17.96.9     www.nih.gov
  34.107.134.59  pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  130.14.250.10  ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  130.14.250.10  ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
  130.14.29.110  blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

EDIT:

While ns.nih.gov, ns2.nih.gov, and ns3.nih.gov do not respond, the nameserver at lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.72) does.

Also see https://tldr.nettime.org/@ww/114089972404202687

anotherpaul• 1 year ago

Thank you for writing this down. Might become relevant if they don't solve that before Monday.

One can only hope this is not intentional.

imhoguy• 1 year ago

Cool, thanks! While the chaos monkey is at work, the true ARPANET spirit is still alive!

the_real_cher• 1 year ago

Nice work!

stwrzn2• 1 year ago

They were not shut down.

Confirm yourself using:

  dig +tcp @$(dig +short ns.nih.gov @a.ns.gov) www.nih.gov

raphman11• 1 year ago

Yes. As noted elsewhere in this thread, they still respond to TCP requests. I did not know this at the time of writing.

nektro• 1 year ago

well this is.. uh.. not good

jjallen• 1 year ago

FYI it has been like this for at least sixteen hours as last night I was trying to read something there too and it wouldn’t work. I hope there’s backups somewhere. I definitely wouldn’t feel bad about using non sanctioned sources at this point.

letthegamesbegn• 1 year ago

The whole country is getting much more unreliable. Feels especially bad when I'm reading this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Nations_Fail

anonzzzies• 1 year ago

I'm not fromm the US, but these servers are not mirrored, at least to have the information? Or is that not allowed?

maelito• 1 year ago

Trust in the US is failing day after day.

fhd23• 1 year ago

As someone in Europe, I'm honestly starting to wonder if the companies whose tech I oversee aren't better off eliminating reliance on US tech companies. Hard to tell what they'll do, being strong armed by Musk and Trump, or even just trying to win their favour.

With server hardware, I can't think of real alternatives, at least x86. But then again, I guess they'll just continue to work once bought :P

Cloud hosting and PaaS: We have some major, reliable hosters (Hetzner, OVH etc), but it's a bit lower level than AWS or Heroku. This part I'm pondering the most, since I mostly want to use stuff you can easily find freelancers to work on. With anything closer to self hosting, that's a bit tricky.

Stuff like Google Workspace, Notion etc is non-trivial but possible to replace with stuff like Fastmail and the Atlassian suite. Not an "as good" replacement, but a workable one.

I still feel a bit paranoid even thinking about this, and I'll ponder it some more before I act. But I can't help but wonder how many European CTOs are in the same boat after the oval office meeting with Zelenski. Kinda brought it home to me that the US is a very different country now, and using anything made there is no longer the no brainer it used to be. If the actual government can't resist their commands, private companies most definitely can't. And with a trade war looming, it'd be easy to just take competitors that rely on AWS et al off the market quickly, spy on competitors in Google Workplace, and stuff like that.

xena• 1 year ago

Look into Scaleway!

_cenw• 1 year ago

We got a few OpenStack-based clouds.

https://www.open-telekom-cloud.com/en

https://www.stackit.de/en/

Earw0rm2• 1 year ago

Is it possible to fully self-host the Atlassian suite with no external connectivity nowadays?

benrutter• 1 year ago

It's definitely a thought I've had too. In particular, there are some tech stacks I know of dealing with critical energy infrastructure which are tied to US cloud companies, I think those represent a huge risk, and I wouldn't be suprised to see a few of them start shifting soon.

softwaredoug2• 1 year ago

Almost everything has been infected by a zero-sum mindset in the US. Some other group of country wins means I must be losing, etc.

The administration doesn’t see that the entire world order is built on many positive sum relationships and coalitions that the US has asymmetrically benefited from. And the same goes for social order. Wealthy people suddenly see themselves as victims(?) of their employees, and investors blame entitled tech employees for companies problems. When the reality is that employee and management - and social classes - benefit economically by supporting each other.

jauntywundrkind• 1 year ago

Non-zero: the Logic of Human Destiny was a very influential book for me growing up, talking about how society's very premise is non-zero sum thinking. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De...

Thanks for this idea suggestion, this spin. Its a framing that, now that I see it, maps well & explain so much. The limited world view is collapsing our world, in horrible ways. Mankind became better than the animals because we grew to encompass more than short transactional views of ourselves, and it's so heartbreaking watching vicious dark side anger unmake the core of spirit that propelled us so far.

buyucu3• 1 year ago

If it makes you feel any better, that trust was very low to begin with.

gilleain2• 1 year ago

For quick reference, BLAST refers to the 'Basic Local Alignment Search Tool' that's a commonly used part of the bioinformatics toolkit. You 'BLAST' sequences by sending a query sequence of interest against a database of other sequences to find similarity hits.

bow_• 1 year ago

I have been out of the field for some time, so I am not sure how much BLAST is used these days.

Therer was a time when BLAST-ing a DNA and protein sequence you have is like doing a Google search on it: it simply tells you where the sequence might come from. This is useful especially when your research is to figure out what that specific sequence is doing. It won't give you the answer immediately (otherwise why bother doing the research at all), but it certainly gives context: sequence similarity often hints at similar / related functions.

As an analogy: imagine if StackOverflow is suddenly down and you don't know *if* it's going to be up again.

dharmab2• 1 year ago

My sibling is a molecular biologist working in the industry and they do use BLAST data. She's been telling her company for months they need to secure access with an alternative source or offline backup, hopefully their software team started it in time.

arthur2e5• 1 year ago

Not a professional, but still use it like that. They also have a new smartblast thing, which works much faster (really, really like Google!) but only on highly similar proteins.

gilleain2• 1 year ago

Fair, and to be totally clear, even when I was in the field (an age ago), sequence stuff was never really my thing. However, sequence comparison is a fairly fundamental tool.

Of course, yes you can run these things locally, other providers (such as EBI Europe and Japan) have them, etc. It's still a bad sign on the pile of other bad signs, IMO.

qgin2• 1 year ago

At some point we have to consider the possibility that these aren’t just cuts to the budget, but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.

llamaimperative8• 1 year ago

IMO we don’t need to attribute malice to it, which will drag everyone into a debate about what’s going on inside the clearly broken minds of a few rich men.

The sheer incompetence of it all is disqualifying by itself.

In my experiences arguing with MAGA, the incompetence argument lands a lot more convincingly than the evil argument.

croes3• 1 year ago

Given the sheer amount of incompetence malice becomes a lot more probable

johannes1234321• 1 year ago

It is not incompetence to put people with no relevant experience into cabinet positions. It's purpose. Destruction with a huge amount of distraction is the purpose.

lkrubner3• 1 year ago

What we are seeing is clearly an act of malice. We need to be honest about that. Trying to obfuscate what we are seeing helps no one. We should use plain English and talk in a straightforward way about what is happening.

sjsdaiuasgdia3• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment

https://www.ft.com/content/02217acf-ac64-49c2-acd5-ef4f107f0...

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/techno-fas...

There can be incompetence and malice together in all this. The malicious often leverage the incompetent to further their goals.

One way to get more people on board with destroying government structures is to render the government structures as ineffectual and incompetent as possible.

genter• 1 year ago

This isn't a possibility. They've publicly stated it's their goal.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225342

throw0101c4• 1 year ago

> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43225342
Everyone should watch the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, speak on government workers:

Russell Vought is the architect of Project 2025:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c977njnvq2do

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025

You know, the thing that Trump publicly said he wasn't part of.

smallmancontrov5• 1 year ago

If history is any indication, it won't even go towards fixing the debt. Capital Gains tax cut incoming in 3... 2... 1...

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 1 year ago

What capital gains? Everyone will be getting tax relief next year for market losses.

bloopernova3• 1 year ago

That's already planned. The republicans want to pass another 4.5 trillion of tax cuts for the richest 0.1%

They simply lie to their supporters, and are believed because republicans are indoctrinated throughout life to believe that "government bad, corporations good, taxes bad, money good, collective power bad, individual power good"

trump said before the election he didn't know what project 2025 was. He lied, pure and simple.

exe342• 1 year ago

The entire federal workforce is 4% of expenses. If they wanted to cut costs, they would halt all private contracts and audit those first.

ldoughty• 1 year ago

There's a proven track record with the Republican plan and USPS that they like to sabotage the agency and then point to the dysfunction they created as a reason to get rid of it. I fully suspect that we're going to hear that several agencies have been non-productive since January 20th and should thus be cut... Despite the fact that they BLINDLYfired not only the new employees, but all the employees that have had promotions over the last year as well (And were probationary in their new role).

i80and5• 1 year ago

I don't know how to fix this ratchet of "Republicans shatter things for fun and self-profit; Democrats try to tape things back together but it's harder to fix things than break them; so voters punish them by electing Republicans" that's been going on my entire life

exe342• 1 year ago

"probationary in their new role"

This is such a big tech "move fast and break things" thing to do. The cancer has now metastasized and reached the executive function.

zaik• 1 year ago

Don't worry, a privately owned monopoly will pick up the slack.

MattGaiser• 1 year ago

This is an explicit Project 2025 goal.

sigmoid10• 1 year ago

It's surprising to see how many people still don't get this. None of what happened so far was in any way surprising. You can literally go right now and read up what else they have planned. We're in for a wild ride.

agumonkey4• 1 year ago

And at some point it's time to take action to go around a rogue non government. We have the technology, we can rebuild it.

lkrubner3• 1 year ago

We can rebuild the government. We will eventually rebuild the government. All of these agencies will eventually be rebuilt. It might take 20 years, but eventually the USA will get back to where it was in late 2024, in terms of state capacity. But the damage being done right now almost guarantees a "Lost Generation" that has to spend its life rebuilding what we had, rather than moving into the future.

someothherguyy3• 1 year ago

It is well-known, but it seems like it is hip to be indifferent on this sinking ship.

throw0101c4• 1 year ago

At some point we have to consider the possibility that these aren’t just cuts to the budget

"At some point"? That point was a few weeks, like when they blindly purged the folks that did maintenance on nuclear weapons:

* https://time.com/7225798/doge-fires-national-nuclear-securit...

Or when they purged people dealing with bird flu:

* https://apnews.com/article/usda-firings-doge-bird-flu-trump-...

csomar• 1 year ago

Given that they Kennedy retracted on the vaccine mandate suggests gross incompetence might be at play here.

clumsysmurf2• 1 year ago

Indeed, as Gary Kasparov eluded to

"These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power any time soon, or ever."

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/02/pu...

https://archive.is/l4kLV

orblivion9• 1 year ago

I think if your argument is that they're making hasty decisions, you've provided good evidence for that. But the remainder of the sentence you quoted was:

but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.

If your argument is that they're trying to make agencies die, and you're using the above as evidence for this, then you'd have to convince me that they want the government to lose control of nuclear bombs or bird flu.

FollowingTheDao• 1 year ago

Keep in mind that this my be an internal revolt.

amelius2• 1 year ago

Argentina style. We've seen Musk with a chainsaw, he's not trying to hide it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly25yny3ego

yapyap• 1 year ago

Don’t wanna be that guy but if not really being about budget cuts seemed pretty obvious from the start, if Elon and Donald got a hand in it it’s pretty much always ego driven.

akudha• 1 year ago

Eh? “At some point”? You must’ve been sleeping. This has nothing to do with efficiency or improving the budget. Bill Clinton laid off thousands of employees, but he did it in an orderly fashion, got congressional approval etc. This is the exact opposite. The goal here is to cause havoc, be cruel, cut regulations (by reducing budget and reducing personnel) etc. After the carnage, divvy up what’s left among the billionaires. So far, it seems going according to plan.

Did you hear what Russell Vought said? “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,”

Anyone genuinely interested in efficiency should start with why the Pentagon has failed audits and is unable to account for tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars

xg15• 1 year ago

I wonder how long until they pull the "who needs public libraries when you have Jeff Bezos?" shtick again.

ck2• 1 year ago

and it's not like private industry is going to do this work, there's no profit in such services, at least not short term

AND if they are doing this to NIH, imagine what they are doing to food and drug inspection for safety

just assume all regulation is gone or being ignored without penalty, now scale that out for four years

Forget "great depression" it's a dark ages of sorts with smartphones for distraction

DevX1012• 1 year ago

TurboTax makes a lot of profit. This a perfect example of what should be a government service being privatized. That model will be replicated.

MPSimmons• 1 year ago

It's really hard to have private companies charge for doing work that a functional government agency performs.

sneak6• 1 year ago

The US mismanaged the pandemic about as badly as anyone could; other than the ubiquitous surveillance of the population I don’t know many us federal agencies that I personally would describe as “quite functional”.

I certainly don’t know any that require they be run by the state.

UncleMeat• 1 year ago

Curtis Yarvin has been writing about this forever. JD Vance has spoken publicly about his agreement with ideas like RAGE (Retire All Government Employees). Musk has similarly spoken publicly about how CEOs are the best people to run the world. Although Thiel is not directly in power, he's also a Yarvin-ite and has been instrumental in both Vance's rise and also the pipeline for the various people working at DOGE to destroy the government.

Alongside these budget cuts, the GOP is proposing massive tax cuts and massive increases in funding for parts of the government related to law and immigration enforcement that will massively outweigh any savings from DOGE destroying entire programs overnight. DOGE is also demolishing organizations that are revenue positive and Trump has fired Inspector Generals, who are responsible for identifying waste and inefficiency in government operations.

It isn't a possibility. It is very very clear.

hedora2• 1 year ago

In blue states, the middle class taxes are going to be hiked to pay for all this, just like under Trump 1.

Also, half of the “law and immigration enforcement” budget increase is actually going towards deploying the military inside the US, which is illegal.

celdon25• 1 year ago

Musk is still there to take the hit, and he will. He's spoken about it openly to a degree. Something about how he's only planning to be in that role temporarily and will get back to building rockets.

DOGE is also demolishing organizations that are revenue positive

The revenue will be still be there when the re-org is completed. Are you worried about competitors?

layer8• 1 year ago

This article is giving some background on the planning and setup of the new DOGE: https://archive.ph/oJRrI

dcow6• 1 year ago

HN was in the same uproar after Musk reformed Twitter. Minor disruption? “The sky is falling!” Brief outage? “It’s malice!” “You see! Musk is obviously driving it into the ground.”

Could there be a world in the middle where maybe the government is bloated and irresponsibly spending money and republicans aren’t just myopic nitwits and do care for our country? And they’re executing on cleaning things up but in a way you disagree with?

Why is it always malice and ruin? It’s tiring. Twitter BTW pulled 1.25B in profit last year…

kevin_thibedeau• 1 year ago

The government is bloated but rather than attacking the bloat (DoD budget that never shrank after ending two wars, subsidies for profitable businesses) they're going after the regulatory infrastructure that protects Americans from corporate greed.

hooverd3• 1 year ago

Because it's the explicit goal of the people doing it. Why go after the CFPB and 18F and IRS Direct File? They've been very outspoken about destroying administrative capacity and making the executive branch a king to punish the enemies of their national conservatism project. Red states are already trying to roll back women's and LGBT people's rights. How does trying to overturn Obergefull balance the budget?

_DeadFred_2• 1 year ago

Ah yes, tech companies that provide zero personal support just scaling storage and delivery are the same as government which is MOSTLY providing support and person to person work, the OPPOSITE of scalable using tech.

catlover76• 1 year ago

It's already well-known that crippling the government and destroying things is the point. To have ever entertained anything else is to have been naive, morally defective, and stupid.

jordanpg• 1 year ago

** WAKE UP FOLKS! ** THIS IS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW. NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US.

If you're in the US, it's time to start asking yourself what you are going to want to be able to say to your kids or grandkids when they ask what you did about it when the constitutional republic was falling.

sizzle• 1 year ago

What’s the end goal here though?

sirolimus• 1 year ago

Really pubmed?!?! USA is a disgrace!

bananapub• 1 year ago

the level of malice towards like...the entire world displayed by Trump and Musk is just beyond comprehension.

how did they become so sociopathic and why did Americans let them have the most powerful jobs in the world?

bloopernova3• 1 year ago

They are being directed by putin to destroy the USA's influence and power in the world.

trump, thiel, and musk also see how rich russia's oligarchs are, and want to replicate russia in the USA.

derbOac3• 1 year ago

I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

It's a viable explanation.

Russian state media were allowed into the Zelensky meeting while other traditional news orgs were not.

The use of tariffs and customs against trading partners to shape general foreign policy, via a compromised president, as well as other things, is strongly reminiscent of Russian interference in Ukraine pre-2014.

Even the Mueller report is best read as concluding there was obstruction of justice into the investigation.

Thiel has openly discussed disappointment with democracy and advocated for autocracy, and his companies have celebrated the current state of things in shareholder meetings.

misiti37802• 1 year ago

Lol

TheAlchemist2• 1 year ago

How ?

One is a convicted felon and the other one openly stated that he's going to prison if said convicted felon is not elected president.

WAKE UP AMERICA

Earw0rm2• 1 year ago

Eggs were getting too expensive thanks to H5N1, so they thought they'd vote in a bunch of scientifically-illiterate antivax clowns.

Think about it this way.. when tech folk got hooked up to mainline net access 24/7, it wasn't exactly good for us. Think 1970s cocaine consumption.

When the rest of the population got Facebook, that's a refined and potent strain being sold into a population with no natural immunity or defensive mechanisms. Now it's 1990 and there's a crack dealer on every corner in poor neighborhoods.

Those politicians who were at the wheel in 2008-10 must bear a share of the blame. They could see this coming, or should have done. There was far too much complacency about what was festering online and how easily it spread.

Did none of our leaders hear about Gamergate in, what, 2015 and go, hang on we've got a BIG problem brewing here? Even GG wasn't really that much of a shock/surprise if you'd been paying attention since the mid 00's.

goodluckchuck2• 1 year ago

Eggs were getting expensive due to an egg monopoly raising prices, according to the egg monopoly. The H5N1 was just the reason given to the public.

ciconia• 1 year ago

I for one welcome our new overlords, they're gonna make our lives so much better at some point we're gonna have to ask them to stop winning!

bloomingeek• 1 year ago

I will only bend my knee to a Pizza Overlord. (I've heard they will have a stuffed crust and extra cheese, at no extra cost!) All they require is I give up most of my freedoms and stop any critical thinking.

datavirtue4• 1 year ago

Who needs critical thinking when you have stuffed crust!

DangerousPie• 1 year ago

European alternatives:

https://europepmc.org/

https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/home

https://www.ensembl.org/

alephnerd• 1 year ago

It's been great seeing the pan-European effort on genomics and biotech.

Denmark's ecosystem is definetly a North Star for this.

That said, BLAST seems to be up [0]

[0] https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi

catlikesshrimp3• 1 year ago

not for me

fabian2k2• 1 year ago

Pubmed is essentially Google for scientists. Anytime you search for scientific publications you usually use Pubmed. Of course there are alternatives, but until now you didn't really have to know about those. Everyone just used Pubmed, I'd bet that even most European scientists didn't know the local alternatives until now.

And there's a lot more functionality made available to scientists by the NIH.

rossant• 1 year ago

I almost never use pubmed, while I use Google Scholar everyday (for neuroscience/medical/computer science research). But I admit that all medical researchers I know only use pubmed.

InkCanon3• 1 year ago

What I'm astounded by is how Musk/DOGE haven't been stopped, sued or even arrested. Isn't this interfering with the proper functioning of government, or vandalism, or gross negligence, some other illegal act?

timods• 1 year ago

They are most definitely being sued: https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal...

InkCanon3• 1 year ago

Not an expert on law, but isn't there some mechanism to get policemen to stop DOGE while he's being sued? Like I imagine if I started taking down traffic lights the police would stop me then ask questions.

chuckadams• 1 year ago

Vandalism and gross negligence _is_ the function of the government now. Failure is the goal.

badgersnake• 1 year ago

This is what the US electorate voted for.

technion• 1 year ago

I find this an interesting position after the news I just saw that police departments are getting cybertrucks. I know that doesn't technically mean anything but it sure has the optics of police being very unlikely to arrest doge staff.

cetu86• 1 year ago

Given what we've seen so far it wouldn't surprise me if Musk had built a kill switch into these vehicles to stop the police from taking action against him.

buyucu3• 1 year ago

What Trump has done in 1 month is probably enough to keep courts busy for the next two years. So, get in line.

jaybrendansmith• 1 year ago

It definitely feels like someone is trying to inflict Project Mayhem on our government. What's the appropriate response here by law enforcement?

kennysoona3• 1 year ago

The people that see this as an issue are trying to respect the rule of law, while the other half celebrate anything Musk and his assistant Trump do even if it's clearly terrible.

When half the people are fine with it and all branches of government are allied with them, there isn't much the rest of us can do except try to clean up the mess when we get a chance to.

goodluckchuck2• 1 year ago

It works for me.

InkCanon3• 1 year ago

I did a quick test, it looks like if you have set a DNS server like 1.1.1.1 you can still access it. But if you haven't, you can't.

fweimer• 1 year ago

It's been pointed out that these servers still respond over TCP: https://mstdn.social/@rysiek/114089755401568345 https://lists.dns-oarc.net/pipermail/dns-operations/2025-Mar...

Given that the service is still partially operational (albeit not in a useful way), it's difficult to say from the outside what is going on.

thomasingalls• 1 year ago

Pubmed is one of the most reliable services in the history of the internet. Sure the exact issue is opaque, but the fish rots from the head.

prepend3• 1 year ago

Pubmed is running. (Thankfully as it is one of the building blocks of science)

hoofhearted2• 1 year ago

I’m a little late to this thread; but is PubMed really one of the most reliable services in the history of the internet?

I worked on the underlying infrastructure that powers PubMed in the 2010’s at the National Library of Medicine.

I was all up in that thing converting legacy pneumatic Johnson Control systems to Siemens PXC’s, and didn’t actually realize its historical importance online. That’s pretty cool to see this comment.

We had full access to the Datacenter at the National Library of Medicine, and as a young apprentice I really had no idea what PubMed was at the time lol.

I only realized how important of a system it might be when we saw the realtime traffic analytics on the screens outside of the data hall.

raphman11• 1 year ago

Can confirm.

Thanks for pointing this out. This makes it much more likely that someone messed up a server/firewall configuration than that Musk is ripping out network cables at NIH.

softwaredoug2• 1 year ago

OTOH it's possible this is the easiest way to disrupt a site - screw with the DNS

daveguy2• 1 year ago

So we are looking at reckless incompetence, and not malice? Sorry, but at this point, prove it.

stwrzn2• 1 year ago

This is for sure a firewall misconfiguration. If there would be malicious intent, the bad actor would for sure not just close UDP.

prepend3• 1 year ago

Why are people assuming this was done intentionally? Is there more info somewhere describing the outage? I would typically assume that there’s some error or intentional crash.

Tyrubias• 1 year ago

I would believe it was an accident or bug if it was any other administration under any other circumstance. Given the vandalism that’s already been committed against basic U.S. government functions, I have to conclude it’s malice until proven otherwise.

wisidisi2• 1 year ago

It is certainly intentionally that NCBI is miraculously down for no real reason. But usually when the political debates are heated it happens more often. What one can observe now is just funny nothing of unhappy political activists.

prepend3• 1 year ago

I hope you’re proven wrong.

I suppose the good news is that there’s no report that this is malicious and it’s all just assumptions. That makes me happier than if there was some intentional shutdown.

And fortunately, pubmed is up and running as of 822amEST

quink• 1 year ago

As for me, I believe it not only because of the current administration per se, but because it's basically same as how the usaid.gov shutdown happened.

gigatexal• 1 year ago

Don’t worry bigballs is on it. What a clown show.

gary_0• 1 year ago

Apparently the FAA database that tracks accident investigations is down also, and probably a bunch of other systems that regular people aren't aware of that various organizations rely on.

If this was a Chinese cyberattack, it would be the scandal of the decade. But it's on purpose.

juujian• 1 year ago

Possibly has something to do with Musk's limit on credit card payment? Very smart all around.

fabian2k2• 1 year ago

I don't think we can guess the specific problem here, but the credit card limits could indeed easily take services offline as hosting isn't payed. So it would not surprise me at all to see a bunch of cases like this caused by the inability to pay their hosting bills.

AlecSchueler5• 1 year ago

Yep, start of the month as well.

ivewonyoung• 1 year ago

AFAIK cloudflare has a contract with CISA to provide DNS for .gov

sunils34• 1 year ago

The entire 18f org was let go. Many of these employees oversaw the building of digital services.

Login.gov is a most critical SSO resource for logging into services such as the IRS for tax payments. It’ll see peak usage next month for taxes. The teams maintaining these have been indiscriminately let go.

More of these online services will start to go down, rapidly.

If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these moves are incredibly shortsighted.

(Yesterday the 18F former employee put https://18f.org/ as a transparent warning of what’s to come)

wil421• 1 year ago

Isn’t the leader of the 18f or digital whatever the so called “head” of DOGE aka the face for Elon. Btw, he’s totally not in charge. Wink wink.

smallerize• 1 year ago

I used to get them confused too, but 18f was a separate organization from USDS which got renamed DOGE. https://18f.org/

thecopy• 1 year ago

If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit

It is obvious it is not. The purpose of a system is what it does.

ethagnawl2• 1 year ago

If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these moves are incredibly shortsighted.

The point is to shutter or kneecap every last government service. When it becomes obvious which services were/are mission critical, they'll be replaced with private solutions -- most of which will conveniently be on offer from X.

fnordpiglet• 1 year ago

In my 30+ years working at about everywhere and on everything the only place I’ve worked, inclusive of federal roles, with intentionally bottom productivity, are private government contractors. Federal employees while fairly kushy in benefits space were often pretty mission driven and believed deeply in what they were doing as they had taken a long term commitment on their role vs more money on the private side. The contractor space is a constant churn of bids and re orgs with the mission being keeping the contract in the next bidding cycle but losing it due to random political whims. It’s the most depressing form of employment I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve worked at multiple FAANG, so that’s really saying something.

decasia• 1 year ago

It basically is like having politically motivated human chaos monkeys running around the data center randomly killing systems and seeing whether anyone notices.

sneak6• 1 year ago

…which seems like not the worst idea?

The very fact that it takes such a battle to even get read only access to analyze where the money is going is evidence enough that there is insanely baroque levels of waste and unnecessary services happening here.

If it’s that important it can be put back.

Why is it so scandalous that conservatives want a smaller government, got elected, and are now making the government smaller?

whatshisface5• 1 year ago

You wouldn't be saying "if it's important it can be put back," if it was a government service important to you, like water service to your house. Scientists actually need to use pubmed.

fareesh• 1 year ago

possibly vandalism by someone looking to be the next Vindman-esque hero in their discord group

belorn3• 1 year ago

So looking at this from a technical point. NIH.gov has three name servers. Each host are still up, but only answering dns on TCP and not UDP. All three are located under the same AS, which implies that there is a single operator responsible. No ipv6. From the outside I can't see any sign that they have delegated operation of either the servers or the service to any external company.

Doing some more looking around, it seems like NIH has a department/group/structure called Center for Information Technology, which is the IT support side of NIH and are the operators for the DNS servers.

g-clef2• 1 year ago

I'm going to regret this, I bet, but here we go: Many years ago I was the manager of the team inside NIH/CIT that ran both the border firewalls and the DNS servers in question (to be specific, at the time it was NIH/CIT/DNST/NEB/NSS). Obviously, since I'm not there anymore I don't have any special inside information, but given that the DNS servers were responding to TCP and not UDP during the outage, my bet would be a simple firewall screwup, rather than malice.

Stuff happens - maintenances have unintended consequences, people typo stuff, etc. Don't freak out about every event - save your powder for the real outrages (like 18F).

bryancoxwell3• 1 year ago

Editing to remove an unproductive comment.

henryway• 1 year ago

18F?

raphman11• 1 year ago

FWIW, nameservers lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.72) and lhcns2.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.128) still resolve nlm.nih.gov subdomains.

belorn3• 1 year ago

Interesting, those IP addresses are under a different AS and under a different organization, that of National Library of Medicine. They don't seem to use the IT infrastructure of nih.gov.

catlikesshrimp3• 1 year ago

What am I doing wrong?

I can't ping 130.14.55.128

jerrygenser• 1 year ago

Is this page correct, indicating they are undergoing maintenance?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/down/

Maxious• 1 year ago

Last modified header of Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:06:32 GMT so I think not - they probably put this html page up one time and redirected requests from other URLs to it and just forgot to remove

Same message is in the internet archive back in 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20201009054447/https://www.ncbi....

koliber• 1 year ago

Move fast and break things.

We don't know the root cause, but the kinds of moves that Musk is pulling are straight from a sabotage manual.

bleachmix• 1 year ago

The US is being liquidated

possibleworlds• 1 year ago

Apologies in advance if this is too off topic, it’s something that has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to mention it somewhere.

I occasionally use the Unifi Wifiman app to quickly test my network, even though I don’t use Unifi gear.

One reason I like it is as soon as you open the app you see a bunch of latency metrics for various domains.

X is one of the default test domains. I don’t know when this happened but x.com does not seem to be running anycast in Australia anymore, I get 110ms latency to x (for many this would be 130 to 160 or higher, my provider uses premium transit). A traceroute shows the server I am hitting is in Japan.

Why? This is highly irregular, I can’t imagine any other major website not having a POP in Australia.

ekianjo• 1 year ago

I don't see PubMed as being down? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=study

paulnpace• 1 year ago

Title is wrong. Sites are reachable, but not resolvable (except for servers still caching, such as 1.1.1.1).

wileydragonfly• 1 year ago

Another cute and recent development is that they’ve really restricted the hours on the federal payment system, making it difficult for everyone to draw down funds owed. It’s all electronic banking, why does it ever have to go offline?

https://pmsapp.psc.gov/pms/app/login

notorandit• 1 year ago

Elon?

stainablesteel2• 1 year ago

BLAST is totally outdated, not because it's a bad algorithm but because people should be able to run their own version locally. i find it disappointing that there isn't a lot of innovation in determining protein homogeneity, i thought of multiple ideas when i was doing bioinformatics but never had the time to implement it. slow and bad slackademia strikes again

colingauvin• 1 year ago

How can you claim to have insight into bioinformatics, but not realize the reason BLAST is run in the cloud is that having all the sequence data of all existing organisms would be absolutely massive and exceed the storage capacity of most laptops?

stainablesteel2• 1 year ago

the data really isn't that large and the algo isn't difficult, most people who do this work don't need to compare proteins across every organism in the world. most people just compare to a few organisms that they work within the context of for clinical trials or data.

if you're comparing DNA and looking at every organism ever you might need such power, but if you do i'd hope you work at some institute that makes your own algo in house because blast isn't the end all be all

niklasbuschmann• 1 year ago

Fuck Elon Musk

creatonez• 1 year ago

PubMed has been sabotaged.

RFK Jr. and Elon Musk gaining political power will be one of the most challenging disasters the human race has ever encountered.

acomjean• 1 year ago

Seems like it’s back. One of my projects when in bioinformatics was making an alternative search with NIH data. They update pubmed yearly with daily updates after that. It really is a great resource.

We link to their pages: eg

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=24827528,%2020832466,%...

geertj2• 1 year ago

I will go out on a (small) limb here and note that it really looks like the intention of this submission is is to associate a technical issue with DOGE and find a friendly audience to further a point. Normally a DNS issue of a government site would not be news. Since the submission does not give any evidence or fact, it is lazy in that respect. And if indeed it had an unstated motive (my small limb), you could also say it’s disingenuous and brigading. Am I wrong? I would be happy to stand corrected.

raphman11• 1 year ago

I submitted this post and can guarantee that it was not my intention to associate this technical issue with DOGE. Quite the opposite: both in this thread and on Bluesky (where a lot of people blame DOGE for 'shutting down PubMed'), I have advocated for Hanlon's razor. My aim was to document that this was just a DNS problem, and to suggest a workaround to affected people.

I actually find it a little bit sad that the DOGE angle is so prominent in this thread.

geertj2• 1 year ago

Thank you for clarifying!

buyucu3• 1 year ago

well, it looks like Elon's teenage boys fired the wrong people :)

greatgib• 1 year ago

Things like PubMed are probably some of best good to the world that did the US in recent years. Especially because of its great openness with widely open API and so...

If it becomes unavailable, my feeling is that the world will really enter in a dark age.

daveguy2• 1 year ago

At this point, if this isn't reckless incompetence, it's malice.

stellababe2• 1 year ago

It is a DNS issue. Try and change which net you are using. If you are on wifi at home try your cell, however if your home network and cell provider are the same that wont help. A solution is to change which DNS you are using. Its a bit nerdy but actually very easy. Do a search on "change which DNS you are using for browsing" On your computer you can add following to your hosts file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc add this 156.40.212.210 nih.gov 96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov 34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

stellababe2• 1 year ago

fortran77• 1 year ago

FWIW, I just tried going to pubmed, searching for something, and everything seemed to work. DNS servers go down every now and then. It's always DNS, after all.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 year ago

DNS servers may be down temporarily, e.g., NIH is doing maintenance, but this is not making websites unreachable

Perhaps "unreachable" in the title is a figure of speech

I have no problem reaching these websites and can provide IPs to anyone who needs them

For example,

www.nih.gov 23.41.4.71 (Akamai)

www.nih.gov 2.22.31.155 (Akamai)

www.nih.gov 60.254.143.7 (Akamai)

www.nih.gov 95.101.74.96 (Akamai)

www.nih.gov 88.221.24.17 (Akamai)

www.nih.gov 184.51.148.226 (Akamai)

www.nih.gov 54.235.145.223 (Amazon)

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 34.107.134.59 (Google)

blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110

Usage example

echo 130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|busybox sed -i -e 1r/dev/stdin -e1N /etc/hosts

echo 34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|busybox sed -i -e 1/r/dev/stdin -e1N /etc/hosts

catlikesshrimp3• 1 year ago

130.14.29.110 redirects me to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

which is unreachable

23.41.4.71 shows the following text

"Invalid URL The requested URL "[no URL]", is invalid.

Reference #9.47532217.1740935192.27b71986

https://errors.edgesuite.net/9.47532217.1740935192.27b71986"

hacker934• 1 year ago

I still can't access blast. Am I supposed to put `130.14.29.110` into my web browser?

chriskanan2• 1 year ago

The main pubmed website seems to be working for me as well and I'm in upstate NY: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

NIH/NSF pages have always gone down periodically for maintenance or otherwise, where this tends to happen over the weekend. It seems like this reaction by the HN community is a bit hasty. I've been reading HN since 2008 or so, and I feel like the comment quality is not what it once was....

chriskanan2• 1 year ago

I'm using PubMed to prepare for a lecture I'm giving on Monday right now and it is working fine: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

raphman11• 1 year ago

DNS resolution seems to work again now. https://dnschecker.org/#A/pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

dang• 1 year ago

Ok, I added [fixed] to the title above. Please let me know if that's not accurate!

raphman11• 1 year ago

Cool, thanks!

directevolve4• 1 year ago

This specific issue is fixed, but they also added censorship. Try searching NIH.gov for “transgender” and it kicks you out of the search.

slater• 1 year ago

nih.gov seems to be back up.

And if you search for "trans", you get search results, tho unrelated (e.g., "transnational", etc.).

If you search for "transgender", it just redirects you to the homepage.

The cruelty is the point.

NIH.gov DNS servers down, making PubMed, BLAST, etc. unreachable [fixed]

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