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daily-triage/split-horizon-dns-mismatch-intermittent-failures.md
Daily Triage Briefing

Split-Horizon DNS Mismatch Causes Intermittent Service Failures

Impact Summary

A fictional triage exercise where internal and external DNS views diverge, causing intermittent connectivity for hybrid services. Practitioners must diagnose the split-brain state using safe, read-only commands.

SeveritySEV-3
StatusResolved simulation
PlatformNetworking & DNS
Incident TypeNetworking & DNS
Published22 Aug 2026
Technologies Involved
DNS

Simulation Label

Fictional simulation. This exercise is a bounded, invented training scenario for practising operational reasoning. No real organisation, incident, telemetry, credentials or production identifiers are involved or implied.

Operational Summary

Root Cause

Divergent A records in internal and external DNS views for the same fully qualified domain name caused intermittent resolution to an unreachable endpoint.

Detection Method

Evidence-led guided investigation

Current Status

Resolved simulation

Affected Services

DNS

Incident Overview

You are on call for a hybrid cloud platform. Users report intermittent failures when accessing the internal inventory service inventory.corp.local from branch offices.

Some requests resolve to the correct internal IP 10.20.30.40, while others resolve to the public-facing load balancer IP 203.0.113.10, which rejects internal authentication tokens. The network team confirms that branch offices use a centralised recursive resolver.

The application team insists the service endpoint has not changed. You suspect a DNS configuration drift between the internal authoritative zone and the external public zone.

Investigation Options

Review the available operational moves and select the best immediate action.

A

Flush the DNS cache on the central recursive resolver.

B

Compare the serial numbers and zone contents of the internal and external authoritative zones.

C

Update the public DNS record to match the internal IP address immediately.

D

Restart the DNS service on the internal authoritative server.

Tags:DNS