I am a DNS and network engineer. DDoSing the DNS root servers is extremely unlikely to succeed, for multiple reasons: 1. The "root servers" are not 13 physica

I am a DNS and network engineer. DDoSing the DNS root servers is extremely unlikely to succeed, for multiple reasons: 1. The "root servers" are not 13 physical servers attached to the Internet. Each IP is anycasted from multiple locations around the world. You can validate this by tracerouting to one of the IP's from different points on the Internet. Almost certainly, each of those locations has multiple high-power physical servers handling requests (either with a hardware load balancer or anycast). 2. The people who run the root servers have thought about this already and taken appropriate countermeasures. 3. What many folks do not understand is the root servers do a very very small amount of work. They do not contain records for second-level domains (example.com). Their sole purpose is to hold the NS records that delegate the "." zone to the nameservers of the various TLD's -- .com, .us, .uk, etc. Each of those TLD's has its own set of nameservers that then delegate to other name servers. If you were to configure your NS records in Godaddy or Netsol, those records are served from the TLD's nameservers, not the root nameservers. The root nameservers have zero knowledge of, say, example.com itself. What they do "know" is that the .com nameservers (a.gtld-servers.net through l.gtld-servers.net) do "know" how to resolve the name. 4. As others have said, there is extensive caching in the global DNS system. For example, records for the delegation from "." to "com." have a TTL of 6 days. This means that, theoretically, the root servers can all go totally offline for up to 6 days before the ISPs' caches would start to expire. Even if those caches expire, smarter ISP's will NOT simply drop those records from their cache and starting throwing errors -- they will retain the "stale" cached records until the authoritative nameservers come back online.