Twitter is being flooded with reports of DNS outages in Germany, Austria and some other European countries. Many users are reporting “.de” domains not resolving and that several root servers are failing.
Update 9:24AM EST: The issue seems to be limited to .de domain names due to an outage of .de zone TLD servers. The problem appears to be in a configuration or database issue as some domains are working and some are not. For example, as of now, facebook.de works but ford.de fails.
Update – 9:42AM EST: Some network operators have reported that they have received notification from the DE-Nic that the issue has been resolved (which was apparently an issue with the 11:00 zone file update) and that the cause of the issue is still under investigation. Sites that were previously unreachable via domain earlier seem to be back and reachable. (ford.de, etc)
Update – 3:04AM EST May 13: SecurityWeek received the following statement from DNIC eG in response to an inquiry on the .de DNS issue:
Partial Non-Availability of .de Domains
Today at around 1:30 p.m. (CEST), DENIC, the manager of the country-code TLD .de, noted that the .de DNS service accidentally sent out “NX”, i.e. “non-existent domain” responses for part of its overall domain inventory, although the relevant domains actually exist. As a result, the pertinent domains could no longer be accessed.
Right after having become aware of the problem, DENIC set up an incident response team who detected and recovered the fault in a phased approach starting at around 3 p.m. (CEST). After 3:45 p.m. (CEST), full system operability was restored.
The above described phenomenon may possibly be faced by internet users even beyond the 3:45 p.m. (CEST) bug fixing time, as Internet Service Providers commonly use DNS caching for intermediate data storage, which may persist for an anticipated period of some two hours following completed troubleshooting.
DENIC, while expressing regret for this occurrence, herewith announce that in the interim, the bug was being identified and fixed. Further details will be notified following careful investigation and analysis.
———————————-
DENIC eG
Public Relations Division
