Albanian government’s websites down!

Since 20.30 today 27/02/2014, most of the websites of the Albanian state are officially down, most of the .gov.al domains nevertheless.

The reason seems to be failing name servers at some point and the factors behind this may be many (conspiracies time). But the main culprit seems to be:

http://www.akshi.gov.al/ as this part of our dear Albania is the one responsible for hosting our country’s government websites . No one can calculate the losses yet or if any damage was done. Let’s wait for the news now.

Well it did not last that long, judging our states expertise i thought it would last at least half a day, but at 21.08 everything was up and running again, we will still have to watch the news to understand the consequences of that downtime, not that they will tell us but just in case.

After some thorough analysis (aka a linkedin discussion) i found out that the root cause of this problem was indeed a nameserver problem from the nameservers in Akshi :

ns1.akshi.gov.al was not receiving TCP/IP requests

So the humanity is once again calm, at least for the moment.

 

In total 45 to 50 minutes downtime is acceptable in our case (although this is sure not an attack issue it may be blamed as one) assuming that all these came from a human error, the most common scenario in our state.