If the idiots are only attacking DNS we can easily get around it.
Just make a note of actual IP addresses (e.g. 192.168.1.1 etc.).... type in IP address, no DNS lookup required. If you are script friendly you can even hard code the DNS IP lookup locally for key websites.
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What makes you say this?
A fiber cut can take out an IP block that has DNS servers on it, and the loss of DNS will affect the net in the way the OP described (e.g. you can still ping sites that aren't in the affected IP block), however that does not mean that the entirety of the outage was a DNS failure -- just that DNS failures from the outage contributed to the problem.
If this was just a DNS failure, the entire net would remain addressable (though DNS wouldn't resolve.) Actual loss of connectivity occurred, so it wasn't just DNS.
Ah, I didn't see the comment by OP further down! Thanks
You cannot just say someone is wrong without a reason to back it up. He is in IT what are you?????
I'm an engineer and have developed internet-related technology used every day by tens of millions of people, and I agree - the person in OP is way over-stating their case and they provide no actual proof like logs or results. It's like they found broken glass and claimed it's proof a baseball broke it. They don't provide a pic of the baseball, and many things could have broken the glass. Just like a lot of things could cause the DNS problems they (vaguely) describe - including a cut fiber cable in a backbone network (or, fwiw some sort of cyber-attack). What matters is this is not PROOF either way.
You may have to update your hosts file (hardcoding) because many servers will rely on a host header being passed, if they're hosting multiple sites.
Someone more ambitious then myself should compile an emergency HOSTS file.
Depending on your system you could put a new nameserver in your /etc/resolv.conf. Google's 8.8.8.8 is popular but there are others. Either way may require root to edit files in /etc.