Erictric

Last night, Sweden suffered a major Internet outage after a routine maintenance to the .se top-level domain went horribly wrong. The outage started at 21:45 (9:45 PM) and ended at 22:43 (10:43 PM) local time. For that period of time every single .se website was inaccessible. Although, it took about an hour to repair, people experience problems afterward because DNS lookups are cached externally by ISPs. So, it wasn’t until about 23:30 that all major servers were flushed. Quite a few ISPs inside and outside Sweden have still not fixed the problem.

The problem was caused during the routine maintenance of the .se domain. An incorrect script used to update the .se domain introduced an error into every single .se domain name. The script failed to add a necessary ending dot [.] to the .se addresses. This in turn caused the system to not understand that .se was the top-level domain.

That one missing little dot, as small as it can be, caused 900,000 addresses to become corrupted. The problem was made even worse because data was then cached by external ISPs. The Internet Infrastructure Foundation recommends those ISPs still having trouble to flush or restart DNS services.

[ Pingdom ]