Update

Looks like the service has been restored.  A few readers reported that it was back and from AU at least it seems to be working.

Thanks to those that provided info on this.

MH

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Reader Paul recently sent an email to us stating that he could not get to tick.usno.nav.mil or tock.usno.navy.mil for time synchronization. Upon quick investigation, we determined that this was a universal problem. The two DNS names resolve to 192.5.41.40 and 192.5.41.41 respectively. This is a clear indication that DNS resolution for these names are working fine.

From there, we began to do traceroutes from various looking glasses in order to determine if this problem is universal. What we saw was that regardless of the looking glass, the traffic never made it past 2 hops at the most. This lead us to believe it could be a BGP problem, so we started to determine if the problem was with just the network in question or if the whole AS was down.

Further research pointed out that this network is part of AS721. However, it appears as if this network is no longer listed as part of that AS number based upon the CIDR Report for the AS. So it seems clear that there was a recent change removing this network from the AS and hence this is the reason those addresses are not reachable.

The final conclusion is that either the network was removed from the AS in error, or the systems were moved to a different address range without the DNS records being updated. We would notify the cert.mil if we had the ability to visit their website. Unfortunately, we do not.