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.es and .pt riding out massive power outage

Kevin Murphy, April 28, 2025, Domain Registries

A lesson in the importance of redundancy in your DNS architecture?

The ccTLDs for Spain and Portugal seem to be largely unaffected by an ongoing power cut that has seen both countries go into blackout (metaphorically) for the last several hours.

At time of writing, no explanation for the outage, which has also affected parts of France, has been given by authorities. Traffic lights, public transport, airports, radio stations and telecommunications networks have all reportedly been affected.

But .es and .pt domains appear to be resolving just fine, at least from where I’m sitting.

Both registries — DNS.pt and Red.es — have DNS resolution services distributed across multiple nameservers managed by multiple providers in multiple global locations.

As well as at home in Lisbon, .pt’s nameservers can be found as far afield as California and Brazil through partners Packet Clearing House and Nic.br. Red.es also uses PCH in California, though its remaining nodes are in Madrid.

Any data center worth a damn has an uninterruptable power supply and backup generators, so one assumes the local DNS nodes are up and running too.

DNS.pt has posted a notice on its web site saying that customer services are currently unavailable due to “circumstances beyond our control”.

It’s not clear if other registry systems have been affected by the outage, but presumably with a total lack of electricity registrants have more pressing things to worry about, like how to get home from work and whether the food in their freezers will be edible when they get there.

DNSSEC claims another ccTLD victim

Kevin Murphy, October 10, 2022, Domain Registries

A botched DNSSEC upgrade has been fingered as the source of an outage that made .na domain names inaccessible last Tuesday.

Reports and archived DNS records show that names in the Namibian ccTLD suffered as many as 12 hours of downtime following the glitch, which has been blamed on human error.

When DNSSEC-signed domains, including TLDs, are unable to establish a cryptographic chain of trust, anyone using a DNSSEC-compatible resolver will be unable to access web sites or emails of affected domains.

Namibian Network Information Center boss Eberhard Lisse, talking to The Namibian newspaper, blamed the downtime on an unspecified upstream provider pushing an algorithm upgrade “without all prerequisite steps having been completed”.

It’s the second DNSSEC incident to hit .na following a July 2019 glitch, and one of dozens to affect TLDs since the technology started to become more broadly adopted.

ZoneEdit offline for five days

Kevin Murphy, April 25, 2012, Domain Registrars

The Dotster-owned DNS service provider ZoneEdit this morning returned from an unexplained five-day outage that has left many users extremely miffed.
The interruption affected only ZoneEdit’s management interface, not its DNS resolution, so it only affected customers who needed to make changes to their zones.
Users first started reporting they couldn’t access their accounts on Friday.
I’ve reported the story for The Register here.