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[flagged] .gov Sites Are Offline (faa.gov)
39 points by ngkw 8 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 29 comments



For the longest time nasa.gov required a www subdomain to work. (https://web.archive.org/web/20120326151831/http://blogs.nasa...)

> The answer goes back to the early 1990s, when the Internet existed – but the World Wide Web did not. NASA was on the Net very early in its history, and the nasa.gov Domain Name Servers (DNS) – the Internet's version of a phone book (OK, online directory) – handled bulletin board systems, Gopher and more. When the World Wide Web came along, www.nasa.gov became the agency's primary home online.

> Today the World Wide Web is still one of the many, many networked services NASA provides, all based on the nasa.gov domain. But along the way the web became the public's most widely used aspect of the Internet, so much that the "www" became almost implicit. It started to disappear from the URLs of popular websites. NASA never made that switch, and our domain servers still do not forward users looking for nasa.gov to www.nasa.gov. (Though many web browsers now do that automatically once you've visited a site.)

Looks like FAA might still be that way, or the changes are still rolling out.


Indeed, faa.gov doesn't have an A record in DNS at the moment.

https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/dig/#A/faa.gov


> domain servers still do not forward users looking for nasa.gov to www.nasa.gov.

Domain servers would never do this. Redirection happens through the HTTP protocol or associated mechanisms not through DNS.


That's probably a finer detailed point than NASA.gov's public blog typically needs to worry about.


One reason some sites used to be stuck with this configuration is that you can CNAME a www subdomain to a CDN but you can't CNAME your eTLD+1 without also affecting your other records (MX/etc).

There have been various solutions to this problem like ALIAS records, but perhaps they never upgraded.


Remember that time when facebook.com went down for hours, but www.facebook.com didn't?


Counter-point: https://www.nasa.gov/


Is there a way to unflag/vouch for stories that have been flagged like there is for comments? This article shouldn't be flagged IMO. It covers some notable government tech changes and could be directly related to a number of datasets and research disappearing on the same day.


If your account has met various criteria (seasoned, karma, no comment throttling, etc), you’ll have a vouch option (unless you’ve done something to be in the penalty box permanently; sufficient karma, no comment throttling, no vouch).


Note, though, that the vouch link only appears when the submission has been flagkilled (i.e. [flagged][dead] and not just [flagged]).


I suppose this was flagged because https://www.faa.gov is up.

But, https://www.census.gov was down (I saw the empty skeleton of a page), then a minute later it was up. So, same thing could have happened here.


I did too; browser tools said a CSP mixup had blocked their Bootstrap CDN. Looked like a mistake, not the entire site being gone.



It seems to be pointing at something attempting to visualize JIRA activity, but with a lot of content-security-policy warnings?

Seems like someone screwed up some load balancer settings.


https://data.census.gov/ is working fine, so weird.


Trump putting 'pause' on most US Government websites, source says

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42892985



I think the source is misunderstanding changes that are definitely happening.

They're scrubbing sites of specific topics (with a broad brush!), but not taking them entirely down. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/31/nx...


do they usually go down that long though for updates?. This seems extremely suspicious.


I see no evidence they are down. I can get to every .gov I can think of to spot check. They’re removing parts of many.


This is a legitimate shit show.


Agree, why do the sites need to be offline for this? Amateur hour, probably some reality star calling the shots again


Irs.gov is definitely up. Merriment will ensue if it goes down.


FCC, FTC and NOAA are up - how widespread is this?


The hero we need: https://xkcd.com/705/


"created: July 17, 2017, karma: 45"

Do you feel this stunt was worth it?


If you're asserting they're spreading FUD on a burner account, you have to check that it is the only thing they're doing, which from their profile is easy to confirm is not the case.


Not sure I follow. You can't spread FUD (well: I'd call it a false fire alarm) if you have previously spread non-FUD?

That burner account thing was something you brought into the discussion.




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