What does "DNS Change Alerts Due to TTL Changes" mean?

If you receive a DNS change alert from MxToolbox because of TTL changes, no need to panic. These incidents are typically caused by issues at your DNS hosting provider.

DNS TTL (time to live) is a setting that tells your DNS resolver how long to cache a query before requesting a new query. The gathered information is then stored in the cache of the recursive or local resolver for the TTL before it collects new, updated details.

For example, if your DNS TTL is set to 3,600 seconds (60 minutes), the DNS resolver will have to regather the details of a website (mxtoolbox.com) every hour. If 100 users visit our site during that time, they will all see the same visual until the resolvers update their TTL.

The TTL acts as a stopwatch for how long to keep a DNS record because it represents the time each step takes for DNS to cache a record. Recorded in seconds, using the best TTL time for your situation is key to your site's overall responsiveness.

MxToolbox often sees warning signs of issues and outages at DNS providers. Nearly every case is a problem with the specific DNS provider. For example, this outage occurred on May 5th, 2021, and affected customers' domain DNS servers: DNS outage.

To check the propagation of DNS records across your servers and see the selected TTLs, use our DNS Propagation Tool.