Invalid script disconnected .SE domain from internet

Over 900,000 domains in the Swedish .SE national zone went offline for almost two hours. Sites were unavailable, mail to Swedish addresses did not reach the addressees. The incident happened on the evening of October 12 and became another example of how fragile the infrastructure of the modern Internet is.

A detailed chronicle of events can be restored from the messages of the Swedish hosting providers, who first raised the alarm. According to them, the Swedish domain disconnected from the Network at 21:45 local time, and recovered at 22:43, but the caches with DNS tables at the providers were updated only at 23:30, and for smaller providers - even later. That is, the national domain was completely unavailable for almost two hours, and for some users even longer.

As it soon became clear, the damage to the DNS tables occurred during a scheduled update of the registry, which was produced by the company coordinating the .SE domain . For the update, they used an incorrectly configured script that messed up all the registry entries without exception (specifically, at the end of each entry there was no necessary point). At 21:45 they sent the file with the damaged registry to all providers, they updated the database, and there was an instant blackout.

It is scary to imagine if such a friend happens with the .com zone, which includes more than 80 million domain names.