I'm curious why you don't host your status page on a different domain/provider? When checking this AM why GitHub was down, I also couldn't reach the status page.
The only way that I could check to see if Github knew they were having problems was by searching Google for "github status", and then seeing from the embedded Twitter section in the results page that there was a tweet about having problems. Twitter also being down for me didn't help the situation either.
The attack is on the DNS servers, which take names like www.github.com and resolve them to ip addresses (i.e. 192.30.253.112 for me). Their status page is status.github.com - it is on the same domain name (github.com) as the rest of the site. Normally this isn't a problem because availability is usually something going on with a server, not DNS.
In this case, the servers (DNS server under attack at Dyn) that knows how to turn both www.github.com and status.github.com into an IP address were under attack and couldn't respond to a query. The only way to mitigate this would be to have a completely different domain (i.e. githubstatus.com) and host the DNS with a different company (i.e. not Dyn).
Right, this was my point. Hosting "status.domain.com" doesn't help much when it's "domain.com" that's having the problem. I think today's event will make a lot of companies consider this a bit more.
Anyway, for them to take the github.com nameservers out of the mix they would need a completely separate domain name; would you know to look there?
You can delegate subdomains to other providers, but the NS records are still present in the servers listed in the registrar. So, you'd already need multiple DNS providers.. And you wouldn't have been down. Just sayin. I'm not sure anyone rated a DNS provider of this status getting hit this hard or completely as high enough risk to go through the trouble.
It's easy enough to look at a system and point out all the things you depend on as being a risk. The harder part is deciding which risks are high enough priority to address instead of all the other work to be done.
Lots of companies use Twitter for that sort of real-time status reporting, whose own up/down status one would think is sufficiently uncorrelated... unfortunately the internet is complicated.
