Nördnytt! 🤓DNSSEC disruption affecting .de domains – Resolved
- krystofbe - 54550 sekunder sedanLooks like a DNSSEC issue, not a nameserver outage. Validating resolvers SERVFAIL on every .de name with EDE:
RRSIG with malformed signature found for a0d5d1p51kijsevll74k523htmq406bk.de/nsec3 (keytag=33834) dig +cd amazon.de @8.8.8.8 works, dig amazon.de @a.nic.de works. Zone data is intact, DENIC just published an RRSIG over an NSEC3 record that doesn't validate against ZSK 33834. Every validating resolver therefore refuses to answer.
Intermittency fits anycast: some [a-n].nic.de instances still serve the previous (good) signatures, so retries occasionally land on a healthy auth. Per DENIC's FAQ the .de ZSK rotates every 5 weeks via pre-publish, so this smells like a botched rollover.
- Aldipower - 49046 sekunder sedanApparently the DENIC team was on a party this evening! Party hard, but not too hard. https://bsky.app/profile/denic.de/post/3ml4r2lvcjg2h
- tom1337 - 46123 sekunder sedanCloudflare has now disabled DNSSEC validation on their 1.1.1.1 resolver: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/vjrk8c8w37lz
- pocksuppet - 51910 sekunder sedanI must be early. There's not a single tptacek DNSSEC rant in this thread yet.
- sundiver - 54123 sekunder sedanYes, all .de domains down because of DNSSEC failure at Denic https://dnsviz.net/d/de/dnssec/
- siva7 - 51274 sekunder sedanCrazy. I can't remember an incident like this ever happened before and it's still not fixed? .de is probably the most important unrestricted domain after .com from an economical perspective. Millions of businesses are "down".
- chromehearts - 53006 sekunder sedanI was STRESSING tf out because I wasn't able to connect to my services & apps through my domains like at all .. they only work when using my phone data ? .. thank god it's not my fault this time
- tom1337 - 49770 sekunder sedanI have never used DNSSEC and never really bothered implementing it, but do I understand it correctly that we took the decentralized platform DNS was and added a single-point-of-failure certificate layer on top of it which now breaks because the central organisation managing this certificate has an outage taking basically all domains with them?
- sunaookami - 53040 sekunder sedanhttps://status.denic.de/ says "Partial Service Disruption" for DNS Nameservice now.
EDIT: it says "Service Disruption" now
- kuerbel - 53085 sekunder sedanI just spent the better half of an hour to debug unbound and the pihole because I thought it's a me problem...
Good news though, if you add domain-insecure: "de" to your unbound config everything works fine
- __michaelg - 53071 sekunder sedanFinally establishing the concept of Feiertag on the internet. Come back tomorrow.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 - 53273 sekunder sedan.de TLD is online. DNS working fine
DNSSEC not working
If using an open resolver, i.e., a shared DNS cache, e.g., third party DNS service such as Google, Cloudflare, etc., then it might fail, or it might not. It depends on the third party DNS provider
https://datatracker.ietf.org/meeting/118/materials/slides-11...
- SEJeff - 44556 sekunder sedanJust gonna leave this absolute gem from Thomas Ptacek on DNSSEC here:
- iknowstuff - 53524 sekunder sedanKurzgesagt predicted this, Germany is OVER
- kaltsturm - 48939 sekunder sedanDenic will be added to the "Major DNSSEC Outages and Validation Failures" list: https://ianix.com/pub/dnssec-outages.html
- yassiniz - 48682 sekunder sedanShops open normally from 8am to 8pm in Germany. Today we decided to pilot opening hours for .de domains as well
- aboardRat4 - 41927 sekunder sedan
- basilikum - 42609 sekunder sedanThis is the kind of system failure that we need really good and well tested disaster recovery plans for. While not necessary this time, DENIC and any critical infrastructure provider should be able to rebuild their entire infrastructure from scratch in a tolerable amount of time (Rather days than hours in the case of a full rebuild). Importantly the disaster recovery plan has to work without reliance on either the system that is failing, but also on adjacent systems that might have hidden dependencies on the failing system.
I'm really not too close to Denic and know nothing about their internals, but just close enough to have experienced the stress of someone working for DENIC second hand during the outage. From the very limited information I happened to gather DENIC had some trouble in addressing the issue because, surprise, infrastructure that they need to do so runs on de domains. [1]
I'm convinced there are all kinds of extended cyclic decencies between different centralization points in the net.
If some important backbone of the internet is down for an extended time, this will absolutely cause cascading failures. And thesw central points of failure are only getting worse. I love Let's Encrypt, but if something causes them to hard fail things will go really bad once certificates start to expire.
We need concrete plans to cold start extended parts of the internet. If things go really bad once and communication lines start to fail, we're in for a bad time.
Maybe governments have redundant, ultra resistant, low tech communication lines, war rooms and a list of important people in the industry who they can find and put in these war rooms so they can coordinate the rebuild of infrastructure. But I doubt it.
[^1] I don't know if there is some kind of disaster plan in the drawer at DENIC that would address this. I don't mean to allege anything against DENIC specifically, but broadly speaking about companies and infrastructure providers, I would not be surprised if there was absolutely no plan on what to do if things really go down and how to cold start cyclic dependencies or where they even are.
- edb_123 - 47262 sekunder sedanThings seem to be on their way up now, and https://status.denic.de/ is working again, at least from here.
DENIC's status page currently says "Frankfurt am Main, 5 May 2026 – DENIC eG is currently experiencing a disruption in its DNS service for .de domains. As a result, all DNSSEC-signed .de domains are currently affected in their reachability. The root cause of the disruption has not yet been fully identified. DENIC’s technical teams are working intensively on analysis and on restoring stable operations as quickly as possible.
- nfreising - 49296 sekunder sedanThey can join the (rather long) list of TLD DNSSEC outages https://ianix.com/pub/dnssec-outages.html
- elevation - 51860 sekunder sedanI've considered hard-coding some addresses into firmware as a fallback for a DNS outtage (which is more likely than not just misconfigured local DNS.) Events like this help justify this approach to the unconcerned.
- alper - 7933 sekunder sedanI'd expect political escalation for something like this but given that this is Germany, who knows.
- kangalioo - 54799 sekunder sedanSo glad I found someone mention this. Amazon.de, SPIEGEL.de is down. Highly prominent sites unreachable. I wonder how long this will last and how big of a thing this ends up being once people talk about it :o Feels big to me
- yowmamasita - 48704 sekunder sedanThe same day Kurzgesagt posted their video “Germany is over”. Huh. https://youtu.be/n-gYFcVx-8Y
- Zopieux - 45265 sekunder sedanThat postmortem should be a fun read, can't wait.
- kaltsturm - 52391 sekunder sedanhttps://dnsviz.net/d/spiegel.de/dnssec/
yes indeed
- merb - 53518 sekunder sedanWell at least it’s night time which means it’s hopefully resolved in the morning.
Looks like it failed after a maintenance: https://www.namecheap.com/status-updates/planned-denic-de-re...
- taf2 - 46274 sekunder sedanok i picked a bad day to move from one register to another... i just spent the last hour frantically trying to figure out why the new register screwed us or the old register was screwing us...
- dwedge - 51603 sekunder sedanOn a slightly unrelated note, I was setting nameservers for two .de domains a few weeks ago and thought my provider was being crazily strict because they kept getting rejected. Turns out you can't point to a nameserver until that nameserver has a zone for the domain, and you can't use nameservers from two providers unless those two providers are both in the NS records at both ends
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- hmilch99 - 54696 sekunder sedanhttps://pastebin.com/2mQUB8xX seems like someone's going to have a lot of fun tonight
- nuil - 54510 sekunder sedanLooks Like a DNSSEC error:
- adamas - 12779 sekunder sedanI wasn't even aware that was possible..?
- kaltsturm - 49192 sekunder sedanDenic should work out a desaster recovery test - like: https://blog.apnic.net/2022/02/14/disaster-recovery-with-dns...
- 0x80h - 49493 sekunder sedanAm I reading this correctly? All .de domains are down? Looking forward to reading the postmortem.
- g4cg54g54 - 49927 sekunder sedanfunfact: enabling DNS sec NOW will fix your domain instantly if dnssec was disabled before
-> no idea if that also "heals" anyone who had dnssec on before.
-> no idea if maybe they need to roll back something and then rebreak the new dnssec i made a minute later lol...
- 0xbadcafebee - 24620 sekunder sedanI can't wait for the .com TLD outage. Ya'll thought Cloudflare down was bad? Lol
- baby - 24130 sekunder sedanShould I do my usual rent about how the web PKI refuses to move to a consensus protocol
- edo888 - 49291 sekunder sedan
- warpspin - 55215 sekunder sedanWhole .de TLD seems to go offline right now due to dnssec or missing nic.de nameservers?
- yosamino - 52422 sekunder sedanThe last time .de I remember .de had a major outage like this was 2010. I would cite some sources but... you know. That was a fun afternoon, though.
I am very happy that it doesn't happen more often.
- Oarch - 47669 sekunder sedanGermany has fallen.
- jamietanna - 53935 sekunder sedanWas wondering why a few of my sites aren't CSSing, as they use https://classless.de
- victorbjorklund - 52983 sekunder sedanI was just wondering what was up with our .de site.
- kaltsturm - 52179 sekunder sedaneven their own status page is not reachable: https://status.denic.de/
As fallback they should use their X account: https://x.com/denic_de
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- lxgr - 53133 sekunder sedanWow, I thought I was somehow unaffected but my resolver must just have cached the sites I'd tried.
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- kaltsturm - 47811 sekunder sedanfrom my analysis DENIC resigned the .de zone today (May 5, 2026, ~17:49 UTC). The DNSSEC signature (RRSIG) for the NSEC3 record covering the hash range of nearly all .de TLD is cryptographically broken (malformed).
- binghatch - 54368 sekunder sedanWow… it’s definitely not all .de TLDs, but a lot of prominent ones definitely.
- tarruda - 52014 sekunder sedanMailbox.org (also from Germany) seems to be experiencing issues too.
- jdthedisciple - 19133 sekunder sedanSeems up again. How briefly did the outage last?
- jiveturkey - 47067 sekunder sedanIt’s not DNS
There’s no way it’s DNS
It was DNSSEC
- bflesch - 48467 sekunder sedanOn Monday there was a huge outage affecting several cities quite close to Frankfurt because someone cut major fiber line; today DENIC is having a party and right when everyone is drunk this happens because some post-rotation task cannot be completed.
There are too many coincidences happening.
- kaltsturm - 47668 sekunder sedanWith chrome it works again
- whalesalad - 50497 sekunder sedanYou can visually see this anomaly in many of CF Radar's charts: https://radar.cloudflare.com/dns/de?dateRange=1d
- NooneAtAll3 - 42152 sekunder sedanquad9 seems to be having problems with DNSSEC as well
- Animux - 47705 sekunder sedanSeems to be fixed now.
- dark-star - 52306 sekunder sedanHow come I have zero problems with any .de domain I tried accessing in the last half hour?
- jiggawatts - 52903 sekunder sedanI work with a few people specialised in IT security, and some of them take their jobs too seriously and will "lock down" everything to the point that it becomes a very real risk that they lock out everyone including themselves.
Fundamentally, security is a solution to an availability problem: The desire of the users is for a system to remain available despite external attack.
Systems that become unavailable to everyone fail this requirement.
A door with its keyhole welded shut is not "secure", it's broken.
- sanbaideng - 49166 sekunder sedanaiimageupscaler
- siginator - 51850 sekunder sedanhow is that possible?
- pogii123 - 53942 sekunder sedanFor me bmw.de works but www.bmw.de not
- neverrroot - 47891 sekunder sedan[flagged]
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- evan0721 - 27712 sekunder sedan[dead]
- blmaniac - 53211 sekunder sedan[dead]
- siginator - 51764 sekunder sedan[dead]
- lpcvoid - 53832 sekunder sedan[dead]
- amelius - 46205 sekunder sedanMaybe related to this? Crazy idea, but nothing surprises me anymore.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/01/politics/us-troop-withdra...