DNS workaround

Note: This workaround was temporary, and MUST be removed now that the DNS issues have been resolved.

Earlier this morning (October 21, 2016), many major websites and hosting companies were affected by a Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attack. Among those affected is the DNS provider used by xMatters, which may also be affecting some client On-Demand instances, depending on the region.

Because the DNS may be down or otherwise compromised during the DDOS attack, you may not be able to access the web user interface of your site if you navigate via the hostname (e.g., mycompany.hosted.xmatters.com). You can still reach your site by accessing the IP directly.

You can also use a workaround by adding an entry to your local network's hosts file to translate the IP to the hostname, and perform the DNS translation locally, rather than on the Internet.

To get the IP address you need to add, contact xMatters Support and we will be happy to look it up for you.

If you want to try and obtain the IP address for your xMatters instance on your own, use the following steps:

Do an nslookup (Windows) or dig (Unix) against the OpenDNS servers; for example:

nslookup <company>.hosted.xmatters.com

OR

dig +short <company>.hosted.xmatters.com @208.67.222.222

This should return a result similar to the following:

~ > dig +short <company>.hosted.xmatters.com @208.67.222.222
hosted-example.xmatters.com.
<RETURNED IP ADDRESS>

Add an entry to your local network's hosts file for the returned IP and the hostname. If the results return multiple IPs, you can use any of them.