by raphman on 3/2/25, 6:44 PM
by fweimer on 3/2/25, 11:50 AM
by fabian2k on 3/2/25, 11:42 AM
Pubmed is essentially Google for scientists. Anytime you search for scientific publications you usually use Pubmed. Of course there are alternatives, but until now you didn't really have to know about those. Everyone just used Pubmed, I'd bet that even most European scientists didn't know the local alternatives until now.
And there's a lot more functionality made available to scientists by the NIH.
by gary_0 on 3/2/25, 12:11 PM
Apparently the FAA database that tracks accident investigations is down also, and probably a bunch of other systems that regular people aren't aware of that various organizations rely on.
If this was a Chinese cyberattack, it would be the scandal of the decade. But it's on purpose.
by belorn on 3/2/25, 12:29 PM
So looking at this from a technical point. NIH.gov has three name servers. Each host are still up, but only answering dns on TCP and not UDP. All three are located under the same AS, which implies that there is a single operator responsible. No ipv6. From the outside I can't see any sign that they have delegated operation of either the servers or the service to any external company.
Doing some more looking around, it seems like NIH has a department/group/structure called Center for Information Technology, which is the IT support side of NIH and are the operators for the DNS servers.
by gilleain on 3/2/25, 11:36 AM
For quick reference, BLAST refers to the 'Basic Local Alignment Search Tool' that's a commonly used part of the bioinformatics toolkit. You 'BLAST' sequences by sending a query sequence of interest against a database of other sequences to find similarity hits.
by DangerousPie on 3/2/25, 11:42 AM
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 3/2/25, 4:23 PM
DNS servers may be down temporarily, e.g., NIH is doing maintenance, but this is not making websites unreachable
Perhaps "unreachable" in the title is a figure of speech
I have no problem reaching these websites and can provide IPs to anyone who needs them
For example,
www.nih.gov 23.41.4.71 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 2.22.31.155 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 60.254.143.7 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 95.101.74.96 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 88.221.24.17 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 184.51.148.226 (Akamai)
www.nih.gov 54.235.145.223 (Amazon)
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 34.107.134.59 (Google)
blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov 130.14.29.110
Usage example
echo 130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|busybox sed -i -e 1r/dev/stdin -e1N /etc/hosts
echo 34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov|busybox sed -i -e 1/r/dev/stdin -e1N /etc/hosts
by jjallen on 3/2/25, 11:29 AM
FYI it has been like this for at least sixteen hours as last night I was trying to read something there too and it wouldn’t work. I hope there’s backups somewhere. I definitely wouldn’t feel bad about using non sanctioned sources at this point.
by raphman on 3/2/25, 10:50 AM
It seems someone shut down all NIH DNS servers.
Right now the NIH website, PubMed and BLAST are up, but not resolvable.
Cloudflare's 1.0.0.1 DNS resolver seems to still have cached the records. Google and most others I tried did not. This probably explains why some people on social media could access the sites while others couldn't.
Workaround via /etc/hosts :
156.40.212.210 nih.gov
96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov
34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
EDIT:
While ns.nih.gov, ns2.nih.gov, and ns3.nih.gov do not respond, the nameserver at lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov (130.14.55.72) does.
Also see https://tldr.nettime.org/@ww/114089972404202687
by qgin on 3/2/25, 11:36 AM
At some point we have to consider the possibility that these aren’t just cuts to the budget, but an intentional plan to visit each government department and giving it a stab wound to let it bleed out and die over the course of the next year or two.
by sirolimus on 3/2/25, 11:37 AM
Really pubmed?!?!
USA is a disgrace!
by koliber on 3/2/25, 12:36 PM
Move fast and break things.
We don't know the root cause, but the kinds of moves that Musk is pulling are straight from a sabotage manual.
by decasia on 3/2/25, 12:19 PM
It basically is like having politically motivated human chaos monkeys running around the data center randomly killing systems and seeing whether anyone notices.
by greatgib on 3/2/25, 2:04 PM
Things like PubMed are probably some of best good to the world that did the US in recent years. Especially because of its great openness with widely open API and so...
If it becomes unavailable, my feeling is that the world will really enter in a dark age.
by sunils34 on 3/2/25, 12:16 PM
The entire 18f org was let go. Many of these employees oversaw the building of digital services.
Login.gov is a most critical SSO resource for logging into services such as the IRS for tax payments. It’ll see peak usage next month for taxes. The teams maintaining these have been indiscriminately let go.
More of these online services will start to go down, rapidly.
If the point of DOGE is really to tackle the deficit, all these moves are incredibly shortsighted.
(Yesterday the 18F former employee put https://18f.org/ as a transparent warning of what’s to come)
by letthegamesbegn on 3/2/25, 11:32 AM
by stellababe on 3/2/25, 2:53 PM
It is a DNS issue.
Try and change which net you are using. If you are on wifi at home try your cell, however if your home network and cell provider are the same that wont help.
A solution is to change which DNS you are using.
Its a bit nerdy but actually very easy. Do a search on "change which DNS you are using for browsing"
On your computer you can add following to your hosts file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
add this
156.40.212.210 nih.gov
96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov
34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
by wileydragonfly on 3/2/25, 1:04 PM
Another cute and recent development is that they’ve really restricted the hours on the federal payment system, making it difficult for everyone to draw down funds owed. It’s all electronic banking, why does it ever have to go offline?
https://pmsapp.psc.gov/pms/app/login
by slater on 3/2/25, 6:48 PM
nih.gov seems to be back up.
And if you search for "trans", you get search results, tho unrelated (e.g., "transnational", etc.).
If you search for "transgender", it just redirects you to the homepage.
The cruelty is the point.
by bleachmix on 3/2/25, 12:37 PM
The US is being liquidated
by acomjean on 3/2/25, 1:25 PM
by stainablesteel on 3/2/25, 1:09 PM
BLAST is totally outdated, not because it's a bad algorithm but because people should be able to run their own version locally. i find it disappointing that there isn't a lot of innovation in determining protein homogeneity, i thought of multiple ideas when i was doing bioinformatics but never had the time to implement it. slow and bad slackademia strikes again
by anonzzzies on 3/2/25, 11:33 AM
I'm not fromm the US, but these servers are not mirrored, at least to have the information? Or is that not allowed?
by paulnpace on 3/2/25, 1:03 PM
Title is wrong. Sites are reachable, but not resolvable (except for servers still caching, such as 1.1.1.1).
by juujian on 3/2/25, 12:15 PM
Possibly has something to do with Musk's limit on credit card payment? Very smart all around.
by chriskanan on 3/2/25, 4:58 PM
by jerrygenser on 3/2/25, 12:35 PM
by ekianjo on 3/2/25, 12:55 PM
by fortran77 on 3/2/25, 2:56 PM
FWIW, I just tried going to pubmed, searching for something, and everything seemed to work. DNS servers go down every now and then. It's always DNS, after all.
by daveguy on 3/2/25, 2:37 PM
At this point, if this isn't reckless incompetence, it's malice.
by notorandit on 3/2/25, 1:07 PM
Elon?
by goodluckchuck on 3/2/25, 11:49 AM
It works for me.
by fareesh on 3/2/25, 12:26 PM
possibly vandalism by someone looking to be the next Vindman-esque hero in their discord group
by gigatexal on 3/2/25, 12:05 PM
Don’t worry bigballs is on it. What a clown show.
by creatonez on 3/2/25, 1:12 PM
PubMed has been sabotaged.
RFK Jr. and Elon Musk gaining political power will be one of the most challenging disasters the human race has ever encountered.
by nektro on 3/2/25, 11:22 AM
well this is.. uh.. not good
by bananapub on 3/2/25, 11:39 AM
the level of malice towards like...the entire world displayed by Trump and Musk is just beyond comprehension.
how did they become so sociopathic and why did Americans let them have the most powerful jobs in the world?
by niklasbuschmann on 3/2/25, 1:10 PM
Fuck Elon Musk
by maelito on 3/2/25, 11:36 AM
Trust in the US is failing day after day.
by ciconia on 3/2/25, 11:42 AM
I for one welcome our new overlords, they're gonna make our lives so much better at some point we're gonna have to ask them to stop winning!
/s
by InkCanon on 3/2/25, 11:45 AM
What I'm astounded by is how Musk/DOGE haven't been stopped, sued or even arrested. Isn't this interfering with the proper functioning of government, or vandalism, or gross negligence, some other illegal act?
by geertj on 3/2/25, 1:36 PM
I will go out on a (small) limb here and note that it really looks like the intention of this submission is is to associate a technical issue with DOGE and find a friendly audience to further a point. Normally a DNS issue of a government site would not be news. Since the submission does not give any evidence or fact, it is lazy in that respect. And if indeed it had an unstated motive (my small limb), you could also say it’s disingenuous and brigading. Am I wrong? I would be happy to stand corrected.
by prepend on 3/2/25, 11:51 AM
Why are people assuming this was done intentionally? Is there more info somewhere describing the outage? I would typically assume that there’s some error or intentional crash.
by stellababe on 3/2/25, 2:48 PM
It is a DNS issue.
Try and change which net you are using. If you are on wifi at home try your cell, however if your home network and cell provider are the same that wont help.
A solution is to change which DNS you are using.
Its a bit nerdy but actually very easy. Do a search on "change which DNS you are using for browsing"
On your computer you can add following to your hosts file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc
add this
156.40.212.210 nih.gov
96.17.96.9 www.nih.gov
34.107.134.59 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.wip.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.250.10 ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
130.14.29.110 blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
by possibleworlds on 3/2/25, 12:53 PM
Apologies in advance if this is too off topic, it’s something that has been bugging me for a while and I wanted to mention it somewhere.
I occasionally use the Unifi Wifiman app to quickly test my network, even though I don’t use Unifi gear.
One reason I like it is as soon as you open the app you see a bunch of latency metrics for various domains.
X is one of the default test domains. I don’t know when this happened but x.com does not seem to be running anycast in Australia anymore, I get 110ms latency to x (for many this would be 130 to 160 or higher, my provider uses premium transit). A traceroute shows the server I am hitting is in Japan.
Why? This is highly irregular, I can’t imagine any other major website not having a POP in Australia.