Science took a major hit today, and most didn’t even notice.
The U.S. govt (or better elons cronies) shut down #PubMed, one of the most important, comprehensive, widely used, free database of biomedical and life sciences.
It provided access to millions of research articles clinical studies and reviews.
PubMed was a cornerstone of modern medical and life sciences research.
Edit: It seems to be an DNS issue that has not been resolved yet (for everybody)
It seems DNS servers have been shut down. Situation is unclear, but i guess we can not rely on this source fully anymore. Expect censoring at least.
Check out the european alternative:
@martinjuhasz it seems it is related to DNS according to
The @[email protected] noticed [1] that something's wrong with PubMed so I did a little investigating with the help of my favourite command line tools, host(1), traceroute(1) and RIPE's BGPPlay tool. The hostname for pubmed is pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. The DNS zone is ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. DNS zones have serial numbers. That's how secondary nameservers can figure out if something has changed and they should fetch a new copy of the zone to serve. They figure this out using a serial number which, by convention, is a date and a sequence number. % host -t soa ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ncbi.nlm.nih.gov has SOA record dns1-ncbi.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. systems.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. 2025022701 10800 5400 2419200 82800 This suggests that the zone was last changed a few days ago. So it's not a DNS change that led to this problem. That zone has seven nameservers. Rather a lot, but not unusual for an old government system, $ host -t ns ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ncbi.nlm.nih.gov name server ns.nih.gov. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov name server ns2.nih.gov. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov name server ns3.nih.gov. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov name server lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov name server lhcns2.nlm.nih.gov. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov name server dns1-ncbi.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov name server dns2-ncbi.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Asking these nameservers directly for the address of pubmed, we find that the ones ending with nlm.nih.gov work fine, $ host -4 -t a pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov lhcns1.nlm.nih.gov. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov has address 34.107.134.59 28 min but asking any of the first three does not work: $ host -4 -t a pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov ns.nih.gov. ;; communications error to 128.231.128.251#53: timed out What is wrong with the NIH nameservers? To be continued... [1] https://scholar.social/@researchfairy/114089685773663683
@levampyre @martinjuhasz as Martin has said above there is Europe pmc
According to them
https://europepmc.org/Help#howjournals
They mirror a lot from pmc.
@martinjuhasz They're not shut down, they're pretty dorked, though.
If you do a "dig www.nih.gov +tcp -t MX", you'll get an answer, but it won't be the MX's for NIH. If you do a "dig nih.gov +tcp -t SOA" you'll get an answer that looks vaguely right. If you don't do TCP, you won't get an answer at all.
Their DNS is broken, but not shut down.
Clicking that link now; it does not load for me.
Which suggests that whatever configuration mess up happened has not been fixed.
@hoare_spitall @ErikJonker @michael_w_busch @martinjuhasz
Funny for me (greater Munich area)it ain't 🧐
But this could very well be too much traffic as everyone currently visits the site to see if it's still down 😅
Kinda like a self fulfilling prophecy. Let's hope that is the case.
@Kmachel
Nahh, they have huge loads on a daily basis.
DOGE took down all DNS for nih.gov, it's propagating slowly and unevenly. It may take some days for it to fall everywhere. But if you do have access, take note of the IP if you know how, you could perhaps use that directly.
@hoare_spitall @ErikJonker @michael_w_busch @martinjuhasz
@dedicto @martinjuhasz So there is no announced shutdown as far as I know.
What it looks like is someone screwed up some important pieces of NIH's core internet infrastructure, causing routing instability on top of them configuring their DNS server or firewall to not accept DNS traffic over a transport protocol that a lot of DNS resolvers are configured to exclusively use, so depending on who your ISP is, what DNS resolver your computer uses to look up domain names, and how it is configured, you may or may not be able to connect to PubMed and a whole host of other federal sites.
That's why it works normally for some people and not for others.
There are some other weird mistakes, but they're less relevant for what's currently going on with PubMed.
@martinjuhasz @starhawk Werks on my machine.
Firing people randomly is bound to cause things to fail just from insufficient or insufficiently trained staff.
@martinjuhasz hurray for edits on mastodon. Was just checking and pubmed seemed online to me.
Another case where it was DNS even when it did not seem so at first.
The sad thing is that pubmed getting pulled is no longer unthinkable.
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