Dyn / DynDNS

» see dyn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

A home internet connection does not come with a fixed address, and TTNet never pretended otherwise. Every re-sync handed you a different one. If you wanted anything running at home to be reachable from outside, you needed a name that would follow the address around, and for most of two decades the answer to that was a free dyndns.org hostname. I was not running anything the world needed to find, but the problem was the standard one and so was the answer.

Dyn started in late 1998 as a student project at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Tim Wilde was sixteen and wanted to reach lab machines and printers from off campus. He put dynamic DNS on the open internet and charged nothing for it, and it turned out an enormous number of people had the same problem and no budget to solve it with.

It stayed a hobby with a donation button until the donations passed forty thousand dollars, which was enough of a signal to incorporate in 2001. Jeremy Hitchcock came in as a founder alongside Wilde, and by 2012 the company was raising a 38 million dollar Series A and selling managed DNS to businesses whose names you would recognize. The free service that had built all of it was still running underneath.

~ the case file ~

~ the day the names stopped resolving ~

On 21 October 2016 Dyn was hit three times in one day by a distributed denial of service attack out of the Mirai botnet, which was mostly cheap internet-connected cameras and home routers still carrying their factory passwords. Dyn was authoritative DNS for a large share of the American web, and DNS is the part nobody thinks about, because it works.

Twitter went dark. So did Reddit, GitHub, Netflix and Spotify, in waves, across the eastern United States and then Europe. None of those services had failed. Their names simply could not be turned into numbers any more, which from the user's side is the same thing. It remains the clearest public demonstration anyone has had that the internet runs on single points of failure, and that most of them are companies you have never heard of.

~ from free to retired ~

The free tier was already gone by then. On 7 April 2014 Dyn emailed everyone holding a free hostname to say it would stop working on 7 May, with a discount on the paid product offered instead. The reaction was what you would expect from people who had been given something for fifteen years. It was also the correct decision, since the free accounts were most of the load and none of the revenue.

Oracle agreed to buy the company on 21 November 2016, a month after the attack. Dyn became a business unit, then a set of features inside Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. After that it was a series of end-of-life notices with dates that kept moving. The last of them retired the managed DNS on 31 May 2023. A service a sixteen-year-old put online so he could print from off campus ended as a migration deadline inside a database company.

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