What was essentially a typo last week resulted in the temporary disappearance from the Internet of almost a million Web sites in Sweden — every address with a .se top-level down name.
According to Web monitoring company Pingdom, which happens to be based in Sweden, the disablement of an entire top-level domain “is exceptionally rare. … Usually it’s a single domain name that has been incorrectly configured or the DNS servers of a single Web host having problems. Problems that affect an entire top-level zone have very wide-ranging effects as can be seen by the .se incident. … Imagine the same thing happening to the .com domain, which has over 80 million domain names.”
The total blackout of .se lasted for about an hour and a half, Pingdom says, although aftershocks continued for days.