Internet breaks in Sweden after DNS maintenance error

A problem during routine maintenance of Sweden's top-level domain, .se, took down the Internet for the country for about an hour on Monday night.

Basically, the .se registry used an incorrectly configured script to update the .se zone, Sweden-based Pingdom, which monitors Web site performance, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. A period was dropped at the end of DNS domain name system records for the Swedish top-level domain, breaking the entire DNS lookup chain.

What this meant was that Web sites ending in .se could not be accessed and e-mail to Swedish domain names stopped working. For some sites the problems will take longer to resolve because of the fact that DNS lookups are cached externally and those servers had to be flushed, Pingdom said.

There are more than 900,000 .se domain names and every one of them was affected, the company said.

The Web site for the registry for Sweden's top-level domain, where a maintenance problem led to a temporary Internet outage in the country.

(Credit: Stiftelsen f?r Internetinfrastruktur)

[n3td3v]

The vulnerability of domain names for a country is that if the bad guys want to target a particular country, its made easy to do so, because for some stupid reason we decided to have domain names for each country.

[timber2005]

We would easily run out of names under .com, .net, .org, .biz, .int, .info, etc.

[viper396]

Ok smart guy, what exactly is so stupid about have the domain names reflect the country of origin? Either way, whether it was a .com or a .se the possiblitities of human error or even intentionnal vandalism still exist.

[Seaspray0]

@n3td3v. "...because for some stupid reason we decided to have domain names for each country." But there are advantages too. For instance, all those spam emails with links to .cn now get filtered out with a simple rule.

[Dalkorian]

Drop a dot in the .com domain and see what happens there. Hint, it won't be much prettier. For a name like "n3td3v", you seem to have a loose grasp on how Bind works.

[biffhenerson]

For a network that was supposed to survive a nuclear strite, it is sure fragile.

[timber2005]

Well had the article mentioned all .se sites were still accessable by their IP ADDRESS, you'd know that every site was infact still accessable... assuming you knew how to access it in the way the internet was originally designed.

[Hunnter2k3]

Actually, that is a very common misconception.
The internet was not built to survive a nuclear strike, that was ARPANET.
And even that was a rumor too, it wasn't a fact.

The real truth is that it was designed to deal with network losses, which for the most part is true. (with respect to ARPANET)
But the Internet has some very subtle differences that rely on trust at the highest levels. And sadly, trust led to the entire internet being pointed to 0.0.0.0 and various other global blackouts. (like the quite recent Youtube blackout for 2/3s of the Internet, or 1/3.. one of the two)
And another recent one was that some rogue group were operating a backbone on one of the root IP addresses for years without anyone noticing. They got away with god knows what kind of information and nobody has a clue where they came from or how it went on for so long without anyone knowing...

[theboyr]

While most people here know how to do that probably... I guarantee 95% of computer users would be lost.

DNS and domain names have become an integral part of the internet (and local area networks too now). If they fail, the internet has failed the mass population.

[VoiceOfLogic]

Maybe they can get their wonderful socialist government to fix it.

[01Phyxius]

Oh goody, political flamebait.
Ill get my popcorn and soda.