Authoritative vs recursive DNS

One holds the zone. The other hunts for an answer and caches it. Mixing them up is how outages get misread.

Authoritative servers answer for zones they are configured to host. They are the source of truth for that name. Recursive resolvers take a stub's question, walk the hierarchy or hit cache, and return the answer. Your laptop is usually a stub. Your organisation's resolver or a public one is recursive. ns1.example.com is authoritative for example.com.

A poisoned recursive cache lies to many clients until TTL dies. A wrong authoritative answer lies to everyone who asks. Do not run open recursion on a box that is also authoritative unless you meant to. See also DNS (/knowledge/dns).