DNS Gaffe Breaks Sweden's Internet

A domain name system error knocked Sweden's top-level domain offline for more than an hour last night, once again illustrating how small errors in DNS settings can have huge impacts in the real world. "The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working," reports Pingdom, the web site monitoring service, which is based in Sweden. "Swedish (.se) websites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still."

More than 900,000 .se domains were affected by the error. The problem? An update script left off a terminating “.” to the DNS records for the .se zone. "It is a seemingly small detail, but without it, the whole DNS lookup chain broke down," Pingdom notes. See their full report for more.