Today at around 1:30 p.m. (CEST), DENIC, the manager of the country-code TLD .de, noted that the .de DNS service partially sent out “NX”, i.e. “non-existent domain” responses for parts of its overall domain inventory, although the relevant domains are actually existing. As a result, using this service the pertinent domains could no longer be accessed.

Right after detecting the problem, DENIC set up its incident response team that deactivated those servers from the redundant service infrastructure which may give faulty answers. At around 3 p.m. (CEST) the latter servers were consecutively restored, leading to full system operability at around 3:45 p.m. (CEST).

Irregularities may possibly still 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 incident, herewith announce that in the meantime, the bug was being identified and fixed. Further details will be notified following further analysis.