ICANN Internet breaks in Sweden after DNS maintenance error

[IPB Corporation]

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.