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Hi all,

AWS are having some general network problems right now in their us-east-1 availability zone, which is where we're hosted. This is causing some intermittent problems with our site, and the sites we host. In particular, DNS lookups often seem to be failing, which may cause problems if you try to connect to an external API.

We're following the situation closely and will post any updates on our Twitter account.

All the best,

Giles & the PythonAnywhere team

We have reports that you will see an error when posting to the forums/sending feedback. But don't worry- your posts/feedback are getting through.

This Hacker News post post suggests that this is a very widespread problem, affecting (for example) GitHub, Spotify, and Twitter.

We're able to use Twitter ourselves, but as it's not working for some people, we'll also post any significant updates here too.

Amazon AWS's status page now reports "We are investigating elevated errors resolving the DNS hostnames used to access some AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region."

There are (to us, so far unconfirmed) stories that this is related to a DoS against the Dyn DNS provider.

Here are the latest updates from AWS:

6:13 AM PDT We have identified the root cause of the issue causing errors resolving the DNS hostnames used to access some AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region, and are currently working to resolve. Customers may experience failures indicating "hostname unknown" or "unknown host exception" when attempting to resolve the hostnames for AWS services and EC2 instances.

5:51 AM PDT We have identified the root cause of the issue causing errors resolving the DNS hostnames used to access some AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region, and are currently working to resolve.

We're seeing the issues decreasing at the moment, but there's no news from AWS so this may only be a temporary improvement. Fingers crossed!

AWS now reporting all is well!

6:36 AM PDT [RESOLVED] Between 4:31 AM and 6:10 AM PDT, we experienced errors resolving the DNS hostnames used to access some AWS services in the US-EAST-1 Region. During the issue, customers may have experienced failures indicating "hostname unknown" or "unknown host exception" when attempting to resolve the hostnames for AWS services and EC2 instances. This issue has been resolved and the service is operating normally.

Everything looking good from our side. Some scheduled tasks may not have run while the issue was underway, but should be kicking off now.

Similar issues are happening again; we can't access GitHub from our own local computers, and we've seen a couple of errors on PythonAnywhere. Nothing major yet, but we're monitoring.

Yup, it looks like another wider US East Coast (not just AWS US East Coast) DNS issue.

Things seem to be coming back now. We've only seen a few errors in our system, none for a while now. And GitHub is back!