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.club — the whole TLD just went down

Kevin Murphy, October 7, 2021, 12:13:57 (UTC), Domain Registries

GoDaddy Registry’s .club gTLD appears to have been down for the last few hours.

At time of writing, no .club domain names are resolving, instead returning NXDOMAIN errors to browsers, and the registry is reportedly working on fixing whatever ails it.

The .club registry accounts for over a million domains, so the problem is affecting a lot of people.

At 1107 UTC, the registrar Namecheap wrote that “the DNS information cannot be queried for the domains”, updating half an hour later to say the registry is “working to resolve the issue within the nearest time possible.”

Cloudflare, also alerted by its customers, said on Twitter that it had “identified the name resolution problem on upstream Registry.”

Tucows confirmed that the problem is preventing customers from registering or managing their .club domains.

It appears to be a DNS issue. The gTLD’s name servers, which are all found at get.club, are not currently responding. All six official names servers use the same IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

It appears that .hsbc, the dot-brand for the global bank HSBC, is suffering identical problems. It also runs on the GoDaddy back-end. Other gTLDs on the same infrastructure I checked appear to be working normally.

This is highly unusual. Entire TLDs do not typically just drop off the internet like this.

Like all gTLDs, .club has a DNS availability service level agreement of 100% uptime baked into its ICANN Registry Agreement, which it clearly has failed to meet this month.

The .club gTLD was acquired by GoDaddy from .CLUB Domains earlier this year, raising the possibility of some kind of handover-related problem. However, .club was already running on the old Neustar back-end, which GoDaddy acquired last year.

UPDATE: As of 1325 UTC, domains in .club and .hsbc appear to be resolving again (at least from where I’m sitting in the UK) after at least two and a half hours of downtime.

After the incident was resolved, the registry tweeted:

GoDaddy Registry tweeted:

UltraDNS, the massively redundant DNS resolution service still owned by Neustar, identified the problem starting at 1030 UTC and being fixed by 1415 UTC. It did not specify what caused it, and suggested (contrary to the experience of some internet users) that it was restricted to Asia and Europe.

I’ve reached out for comment, and will update as we discover more…

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Comments (10)

  1. acidburn says:

    no still offline, sometimes you hit the cache from a NS

  2. Matt Nordhoff says:

    .hsbc, a brand TLD operated by GoDaddy Registry, is also down the same way.

  3. Peter van Dijk says:

    > UPDATE: As of 1325 UTC, domains in .club and .hsbc appear to be resolving again after at least two and a half hours of downtime.

    Sadly this only appears to be true in a few (US) regions. Various users I speak to in other regions still get SERVFAIL, including me (hitting various European anycast nodes).

  4. Which means that this backend is going to become more secured for the next round …..

    • Rubens Kuhl says:

      Actually, this might have just taken their pre-approved status (as registry service provider) off the table.

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