24 March 2022 – A number of sites with Australian domain names did not resolve correctly on Tuesday afternoon.
The issue was present for about three hours before it appeared to be resolved.
It was reported that 15,000 major news and government websites were affected by the .au error.
Users reported being unable to access a wide variety of websites in Australia from about 4.30pm AEDT, including those run by News Corp and Nine, the AFL, the Victorian parliament and the Reserve Bank of Australia.
A notice sent by Affilias, the operator of the .au namespace, to registrars, said:
“On 22 March 2022 between 15:35 AEDT and 17:21 AEDT [04:35 UTC and 06:21 UTC], some Internet users may have experienced an issue with DNSSEC-related DNS resolution.
“DNS Resolvers which use strict DNSSEC validation and did not have the query response cached did not resolve .au names during this timeframe.
“As of 17:21 AEDT [06:21 UTC], normal operations have resumed and DNSSEC-related activity in the zone is working as expected. Resolvers which use strict DNSSEC validation should continue to resolve .au domain names normally.”
Affilias, the world’s second largest domain name registry, was appointed in December 2017 to provide registry services for the .au domain as part of auDA’s Registry Transformation Project.
auDA announced the new .au direct namespace on 19 August, saying it would take effect from 24 March. There is speculation that the addition of .au to the Australian DNS system may have caused the disruption. This has not yet been confirmed by AuDA.
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brandsec is a corporate domain name management and brand protection company that looks after many of Australia, New Zealand and Asia’s top publicly listed brands. We provide monitoring and enforcement services, DNS, SSL Management, domain name brokerage and dispute management and brand security consultation services.
