DNS gaffe cripples Swedish domains

A flawed script left the .se DNS registry without the full stop character

An error within a DNS registry is being blamed for an domain problem affecting thousands of users in Sweden.

The error was believed to be behind an outage which left users unable to access as many as 900,000 .se domains and email addresses for roughly an hour late last night.

Experts are pointing to a simple syntax error as the cause. Operators were believed to be running an improperly constructed script file during maintenance on a DNS registry charged with handling Swedish domain names.

DNS servers are used to link the text addresses of URLs and email addresses with the corresponding IP addresses of the host server.

The flawed script left the .se DNS registry without the full stop character to terminate a specific command, leaving the registry unable to correctly identify .se as a valid domain suffix, and effectively preventing users from accessing the sites or delivering emails.

"An entire top-level domain breaking is exceptionally rare," said uptime monitoring firm Pingdom in a company blog posting.

"These problems are very common all over the world, but usually it's a single domain name that has been incorrectly configured or the DNS servers of a single web host having problems."