Sweden disappears from the internet via a missing dot
We’re all guilty of making typos now and then (anybody pwned?) but usually they just make us look a bit daft instead of dropping an entire country off the interweb.
By missing a dot in the .se domain name, all Swedish sites disappeared from the internet, causing a dramatic reduction of pictures of blond people online.
The problem came when maintenance to Domain Name Systems damaged every .se web address on Monday night.
Sweden could be found on Google again within an hour of the glitch, but some problems still remain as address data cached externally by ISPs need to be flushed- and haven’t been.
According to Web monitoring company Pingdom (ironically based in Sweden) the disablement of an entire top-level domain is rare, “usually it’s a single domain name that has been incorrectly configured or the DNS servers of a single Web host having problems. Problems that affect an entire top-level zone have very wide-ranging effects… imagine the same thing happening to the .com domain, which has over 80 million domain names.”
A script error used to update the .se domain led to the missing dot to be introduced into every single domain name, resulting in the system failing to understand that .se was the top level domain.
Every one of the 900,000 .se names were affected, including email addresses.
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good spot. not a massive loss though it has to be said, I would miss Ikea though