Is Digital Ocean's DNS working?

Hello and welcome to DigitalOcean.

“Why doesn’t Digital Ocean return an A record for hotmail.com?” Easy as 1+1, hotmail.com is hosted by Microsoft and uses their Nameserver.

“Is Digital Ocean’s DNS working?” YES

Watch this Video !!! What is DNS

PS: If you understand it, click on the hearth to show me some love (i really need it, had a bad day :-() :-).

Sorry, I missed the first part of the question…when I tried a “dig hotmail.com” the response I got was the SOA data and no ‘A’ record.

I think either Microsoft or Digital Ocean is being flaky. Anyway it is all working again now. Don’t know why it stopped but it is back

$ dig hotmail.com

; <<>> DiG 9.9.5-3ubuntu0.3-Ubuntu <<>> hotmail.com
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 13245
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 13, ADDITIONAL: 16

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4096
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;hotmail.com.			IN	A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
hotmail.com.		2042	IN	A	157.56.172.28
hotmail.com.		2042	IN	A	65.55.77.28
hotmail.com.		2042	IN	A	157.55.152.112
hotmail.com.		2042	IN	A	65.55.85.12

I notice this when my email fails:

status=bounced (Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=hotmail.com type=A: Host found but no data record of requested type)

And this seems to happen on and off. Looking at google I see that a few others have reported a similar thing with hotmail so maybe its at their end, but I would have guess Digital Ocean would have cached responses?

Sorry to say it, but I and DigitalOcean can’t help you with this problem.

DigitalOcean is not responsible for problems of the Microsoft DNS.

Did you actually watched the Video? I am pretty sure that you don’t understand how DNS works.

DigitalOcean has no cached response, your OS is responsible for that, see :

'''
But using a different server:
'''
# dig @ns1.msft.net hotmail.com

; <<>> DiG 9.9.5-3ubuntu0.3-Ubuntu <<>> @ns1.msft.net hotmail.com
; (2 servers found)
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 45461
;; flags: qr aa rd; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 4, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1
;; WARNING: recursion requested but not available

;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 4000
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;hotmail.com.           IN  A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
hotmail.com.        3600    IN  A   65.55.77.28
hotmail.com.        3600    IN  A   65.55.85.12
hotmail.com.        3600    IN  A   157.56.172.28
hotmail.com.        3600    IN  A   157.55.152.112
'''

PS: you need to use

dig hotmail.com

with

dig @ns2.digitalocean.com hotmail.com

you ask ns2.digitalocean.com where hotmail.com is located, but ns2.digitalocean.com doesn’t know where it is.

The Nameserver who is responsible for hotmail.com is ns1.msft.net