SIDN (.nl) experiences DNS issues

[SH-Andre]

Last night, the SIDN (Stichting Internet Domeinregistratie Nederland), the organisation which is responsible for .nl domain registrations, experienced serious issues with their nameservers, due to a fault in their latest software update. This resulted into unavailability of many .nl domain names during midnight and 6AM of the past night.

While this did not affect us whatsoever (our domain names are not based on the .nl extension, and neither are our nameservers), we are posting this as advice to our customers who are running .nl domain names and/or running nameservers based on .nl domain names.

It is recommended that you do not let your domain names rely on nameservers which have the same domain extension. For example, if your domain name is domain.nl, it is best if you do NOT use:

ns1.domain.nl
ns2.domain.nl

But instead:

ns1.domain.nl
ns2.domain.com

This way, if the nameservers of the SIDN (.nl) would become unavailable for whatever reason, your domains will still keep running without a problem from the .com nameserver.

Or better yet, use 3 different nameservers with different extensions, for extra redundancy.

If you do not have a nameserver available with an alternative extension, then feel free to ask us for assistance. We can help you set up a secondary nameserver based on a different extension.

We recommend everyone to take care of an alternative nameserver as soon as possible, as you never know whether the same problems at SIDN will re-occur.

NOTE: this is not a problem or error on our end, but at the end of the top layer DNS servers of the .nl domain registry