AN ANYCAST BASED, WIDE AREA DISTRIBUTED MAPPING AND LOAD BALANCING SYSTEM

This disclosure provides systems, methods, and apparatus for providing anycast based load balancing for a plurality of servers within a network. The network includes a domain name system (DNS) server that is configured to respond to domain name queries received from one or more clients. The DNS server maintains a set of anycast IP addresses associated with a domain name. The DNS server responds to a client's request with one or more selected anycast IP addresses from the set of anycast IP addresses. The DNS server also instructs a plurality of content servers to advertise all of the anycast IP addresses to the network. The DNS server also receives load information from each of the plurality of content servers, and instructs, based on the load information, one of the plurality of content servers to cease advertising one or more of the previously advertised anycast IP addresses.