We take our operational excellence extremely seriously. We know that one of the reasons people choose OpenDNS is because they know they can count on us for reliable DNS resolution, something many ISPs can’t promise. And so when something happens that causes us not to be the reliable service we’ve promised to be, it’s a wake-up call for all of us at OpenDNS.

This morning, a major Internet provider had a serious routing issue in Southern California that caused some of their traffic to be lost before it reached our network. This type of failure didn’t trigger our monitoring system — because from our end, everything appeared online. Lasting approximately two hours in the early morning on the West Coast, the partial interruption in service was a localized one and did not affect the global OpenDNS service.

When issues like this happen we always like to step back and try to understand what we could do to prevent these kinds of problems from happening again. In the coming days we will determine how we can detect this type of problem more quickly and how we can respond more effectively.

To reiterate: we value our customers, and we take incidents like this exceptionally seriously. And while a disruption in service is never a good thing, we’ll take this as an opportunity to learn, and to ensure we run the most robust and globally available DNS service on the planet. I appreciate the years of support many of you have given us and hope you will continue to count on us to be the most reliable provider of DNS and security services on the planet.

When we look back at 2010, one of the things we’ll remember is how ubiquitous social became online. Facebook exploded, Twitter grew up, people “checked in”, and almost every website seemed to develop some sort of social component.

Not surprisingly, people using OpenDNS — parents, IT administrators, sysadmins, district technology heads — noticed the same thing. Data collected on how people used Web content filtering in 2010 shows this fact: Facebook is the #1 most blacklisted site. And interestingly enough, it’s also the #2 most whitelisted site. Other sites that were frequently blocked include MySpace and YouTube.

Not surprisingly, Facebook was also a frequent target of online scammers. When we analyzed submissions to Phishtank in 2010, we saw that Facebook was the second most frequent website targeted by phishing websites. The #1 target for 2010 — and throughout every month of the year — was PayPal. PayPal accounts for an incredible 45 percent of all online phishes.

These statistics and more can be found in a report we’re publishing today, all about the Web content filtering and phishing data we saw in 2010. I encourage you to download it and read through it. There’s some fascinating information included in the report, including which sites are the most frequent target of online scammers, how businesses are filtering content, and what categories people most frequently block on their networks.

You can download the full PDF report here: http://www.opendns.com/pdf/opendns-report-2010.pdf

DNS outages happen everywhere, from Italy to Illinois. And when they do, we can count on people taking to Twitter via their smart phones, to vent, find out what’s going on, and learn how they can get back online (thanks to us!).

We love helping frustrated people set up OpenDNS during these DNS outages. But one thing we discovered is that for the less-than-technical people amongst us, simply saying “use 208.67.222.222 & 208.67.220.220″ isn’t enough. People don’t know what those numbers are, or where to look on their computer or router to change them. That’s why we’ve created a new mini-site; you can find it at use.opendns.com or http://208.69.38.205/.

Why are we making it accessible via both an IP and a URL? Because if your DNS is down, we want you to be able to access the instructions via your computer’s browser. Having an IP address means no matter what’s happening with your DNS, you can get to the site.

The next time there’s a DNS outage, we’ll head to Twitter as we normally do, to act as a resource and problem solver for those without DNS. And, thanks to this new page, it will be easier than ever to get OpenDNS set up, even for those who’ve never heard the term DNS before.

But our hope is that we won’t be the only ones. Our hope is that you’ll bookmark http://208.69.38.205/ and that the next time you hear that there’s a DNS outage, you can be a resource for your friends. Text them, call them, tweet at them — let them know it’s easy to get back online and it’s simple to get safer, faster, smarter and more reliable Internet — all that’s needed is to set up OpenDNS.