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The recent DNS outage caused me to lose access to the Stack Exchange network. Being a good little programmer, I tried to work around the problem:

$ wget --spider stackoverflow.com
Connecting to stackoverflow.com (stackoverflow.com)|151.101.1.69|:80... connected.

So currently for me Stack Overflow is 151.101.1.69. However Stack Exchange does not allow direct IP access:

Fastly error: unknown domain: 151.101.1.69. Please check that this domain has been added to a service.

This is also true for Super User and perhaps others. I would like to see this corrected, as other major sites like Google, GitHub and Facebook do allow direct IP access.

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    We only have four IP addresses that service all of our sites. How is it supposed to know which site you're actually wanting to access?
    – animuson StaffMod
    Oct 21 '16 at 21:49
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    @animuson In theory, you should be able to send a HTTP request directly to the IP (bypassing DNS), but by including a Host: header, the servers can recognize which site you're accessing. That's exactly the issue that HTTP/1.1 was created to work around - if Fastly allows you to, then "which site do you want" isn't an issue for direct IP access.
    – ArtOfCode
    Oct 21 '16 at 23:36
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    Confirmed - you can do direct IP access by including the Host header: run curl -H "Host: stackoverflow.com" 151.101.129.69 to verify that.
    – ArtOfCode
    Oct 21 '16 at 23:39
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    Incidentally, you can locally bypass DNS for a domain name by editing your /etc/hosts file and adding a static rule (among other similar options).
    – Alexander O'Mara
    Oct 22 '16 at 6:48

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