Effective 3 December 2013, DENIC will shut down their Domain Check (DCHK) lookup service which was in place so far to check out the mere registration status of a .DE domain, thus if such domain was registered or not, at the respective time of query.

Given that the protocol underlying DCHK, i.e. the Internet Registry Information Service (IRIS) standard, has never gained a relevant foothold in the market, and therefore DCHK kept being employed by a small number of users only, continuing the service is no longer justifiable, from a cost-benefit point of view.

In the future, all status information concerning .DE domains may further be comfortably accessed via the Domain Query web interface, or the command-line based public-whois service.

DENIC asks for the kind understanding of all users being affected by the DCHK shutdown.