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I've been trying to find an example of an anycast IP address used by a hugely popular service or a website.

According to my queries at https://www.whatsmydns.net/ , none of the large sites that are known to have datacenters around the world, like

  • www.google.com
  • www.instagram.com
  • www.facebook.com
  • www.youtube.com

all run on an identical DNS A/AAAA resource record set from all around the world; they all apply GeoDNS to some extent, and return different IPs in different countries.

Do you know any examples of a globally distributed website that fully opt-in to using the same public DNS records everywhere?

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    One “hugely popular service” are the root DNS servers. The use of anycast helped some of them survive a DDOS attack around 2007. ripe.net/publications/docs/ripe-393 But since it’s not a website, put in comments rather than an answer.
    – Darrell Root
    Commented Jan 8, 2020 at 1:01
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    Another non-web hugely popular service are large public resolvers such as Google's DNS servers 8.8.8.8 etc. From another point of view, you might regard 192.168.0.1 (world's most common LAN-side address for "route to internet nearest me") as a special case of anycast.
    – jonathanjo
    Commented Jan 8, 2020 at 10:44
  • Maybe you meant BGP anycast?
    – Mikael Dúi Bolinder
    Commented Jan 18, 2020 at 11:21
  • Did any answer help you? If so, you should accept the answer so that the question doesn't keep popping up forever, looking for an answer. Alternatively, you can post and accept your own answer.
    – Ron Maupin ♦
    Commented Dec 17, 2020 at 14:57

2 Answers 2

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A couple of examples are:

There are always exceptions however - you'll notice that within China, the IP for say api.twitter.com is different for reasons that are most likely not technical.

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The anycast IP with most traffic in the world is 127.0.0.1.

- Unknown, 2020-01-18

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    However, 127.0.0.1 is not a global anycast address, and in most cases there’s no website running on it.
    – Teun Vink
    Commented Jan 18, 2020 at 15:00

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