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January 2015 DOI Outage: Followup Report

Background

On January 20th, 2015 the main DOI HTTP proxy at doi.org experienced a partial, rolling global outage. The system was never completely down, but for at least part of the subsequent 48 hours, up to 50% of DOI resolution traffic was effectively broken. This was true for almost all DOI registration agencies, including Crossref, DataCite and mEDRA.

At the time we kept people updated on what we knew via Twitter, mailing lists and our technical blog at CrossTech. We also promised that, once we’d done a thorough investigation, we’d report back. Well, we haven’t finished investigating all implications of the outage. There are both substantial technical and governance issues to investigate. But last week we provided a preliminary report to the Crossref board on the basic technical issues, and we thought we’d share that publicly now.

Problems with dx.doi.org on January 20th 2015- what we know.

Hell’s teeth.

So today (January 20th, 2015) the DOI HTTP resolver at dx.doi.org started to fail intermittently around the world. The doi.org domain is managed by CNRI on behalf of the International DOI Foundation. This means that the problem affected all DOI registration agencies including Crossref, DataCite, mEDRA etc. This also means that more popularly known end-user services like FigShare and Zenodo were affected. The problem has been fixed, but the fix will take some time to propagate throughout the DNS system. You can monitor the progress here:

https://www.whatsmydns.net/#A/doi.org

Now for the embarrassing stuff…

DOIs unambiguously and persistently identify published, trustworthy, citable online scholarly literature. Right?

The South Park movie , “Bigger, Longer & Uncut” has a DOI: a) https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.5240/B1FA-0EEC-C316-3316-3A73-L So does the pornographic movie, “Young Sex Crazed Nurses”: b) https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.5240/4CF3-57AB-2481-651D-D53D-Q And the following DOI points to a fake article on a “Google-Based Alien Detector”: c) https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.6084/m9.figshare.93964 And the following DOI refers to an infamous fake article on literary theory: d) https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.2307/466856 This scholarly article discusses the entirely fictitious Australian “Drop Bear”: e) https://doi-org.turing.library.northwestern.edu/10.1080/00049182.2012.731307 The following two DOIs point to the same article- the first DOI points to the final author version, and the second DOI points to the final published version: