Another ccTLD has blamed DNSSEC after seeing hours of downtime affecting its country’s biggest web services yesterday.
This time it’s Russia’s ccTLD.ru, which confirmed today that it was responsible for the widely reported outages on Tuesday, which had sparked speculation that a cyber-attack related to the war in Ukraine might be the culprit.
It was rather a DNSSEC failure that affected both .ru and the Cyrillic .рф domains, the registry said. It was related to a cryptograpghic key rollover, the registry indicated.
“After the failure was detected, the updated keys were revoked, and the functionality of the .RU zone was fully restored, which took about two hours, including the distribution of data through the DNS system,” the registry said on its web site.
“The investigation into the incident is currently ongoing, but it is already clear that the main cause of the failure was the imperfection of the software used to create the encryption keys,” it added.
The explanation was echoed by Russian government officials on social media, and it’s sadly rather plausible. DNSSEC failures at ccTLDs, and to a lesser extent gTLDs, usually related to fluffed key rollovers, are rather common.
There have been similar outages reported in the last few years in Australia (twice), Namibia, Fiji, and Sweden. And those are just the ones reported on this blog. People who track this kind of thing more closely have recorded hundreds of incidents.
The post Russia blames DNSSEC, not Ukraine, for internet downtime first appeared on Domain Incite.
