Slashdot Mirror
Millions of .de Domains Unreachable For Hours
An anonymous reader writes "Due to an error on behalf of DENIC, the German DNS registrar for second-level .de domains, millions of .de domains fell over the edge (auf Deutsch) of the Internet today. The cause of this GAU (GröYter anzunehmender Unfall = maximum credible accident) is still unknown, as DENIC officials haven't answered any questions from journalists at the time of writing."
According to my informations (DFN NOC) the problems resulted from a botched experiment with DNSSEC. Unluckily the DE-NIC is still silent about the incident.
Once upon a time, the DE-NIC was very respected in the german internet community. But several things happened lately, that let the trust erode. There were internal power struggles, the rising influence of domain traders inside the DE-NIC and the surprising distribution of the two-letter-domain-rush (25% of all domains ending in the hands of a single person). Perhaps this outage will be a wakeup call. If we only count the time spent on customers calling the hotline, the damage for my company is several thousand dollars.
CU, Martin
The DE-NIC finallly spoke out. If you don't speak german, the statement doesn't contain anything that wasn't already well known: Yes, there was an problem starting at about 13:00 and it was fixed around 15:45.