Error knocks out thousands of Spanish sites

An error in Spain's central domain registry resulted in thousands of websites being unavailable for two hours earlier this week.

A failed software update resulted in 400,000 sites being knocked offline between 3pm and 5pm on Tuesday.

The affected sites were domains registered in the .es country code top level domain for Spain.

The problem occurred when the DNS database was "affected by an error", according to Esnic, which manages .es domains.

The DNS database matches domain names to their corresponding IP addresses, allowing surfers to visit a requested site. 

The outage only affected .es domains. Other extensions, such as .com, were available as normal.

Network Solutions' DNS server suffered an outage in November last year, resulting over 120,000 websites being unreachable.

The error was due to a hardware fault and lasted just over an hour. The outage only affected websites hosting their domains through Network Solutions.

While Network Solutions had a backup system in place to ensure continued service in case of failures, it did not prevent the crash.