Edit 4: (Yes, I'm top posting!) Apparently everything is up and working again, and they've fixed their DNS dramas! I would like to remind everyone of the DNS Haiku.

Ediit 1: /u/tbrummell2 pointed out that swiftvox owned/owns VoIP.ms - That'll teach ME for living in Australia and not knowing these things!

Edit 2: Apparently this is a link to all of their IP addresses. I offer no guarantees to its legitimacy.

Edit 3: I've been told by a couple of people that swiftvox USED to own VoIP.ms, but no longer do. Maybe this was a failed DNS migration away from the previous owners?

VoIP.ms have posted that they're having DNS issues, and yes. They are. But it looks like the company that WAS managing their DNS has literally dropped off the internet (not a DDOS), taking all of VoIP.ms with it.

This started because I was interested in how a DNS problem could take them out for (at time of writing) 5 hours. If I was having a DNS outage, I'd switch my nameservers to somewhere else, and the problem goes away. Why didn't they do that, I asked myself?

Well, it looks like they were using a random third-party who have dropped off the internet. If you do a whois on voip.ms, their nameservers are provided by ns1.swiftvox.com and ns2.swiftvox.com who I've never heard of (Edit: See below. Apparently they own used to own voip.ms).

Doing a whois on swiftvox.com shows a completely secret company with no identifying information at all, so that's a bit of a dead end there.

Let's look at their DNS servers! They have two DNS servers (yes, only two, and only ipv4) which are hosted in random places. It looks like they're just rented VMs.

The first one - ns1.swiftvox.com - is 108.163.139.76 which is announced to the internet by 'iWeb Technologies' which aren't experiencing any issues. You can tell by looking at ripestat and you'll see that nothing has changed recently. If they WERE getting DDOS'ed, the hosting provider would announce a /24 to redirect the traffic elsewhere.

It's the same with the other DNS server, owned by 'Steadfast'.

This, to me, looks like whoever they were using for DNS has vanished, and EVEN WORSE, no-one at voip.ms can find the keys to their godaddy account to change the DNS servers to literally anywhere else.

You guys are NOT going to have fun. Sorry.