Interesting stuff from around the web

By Tom Chivers
Published: 9:52AM BST 14 Oct 2009

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Just some of the things the internet was missing Photo: STEPHEN HIRD

At 9:45pm local time on Monday 12 October, every Swedish website went down, and no emails to or from Swedish domains could be received. Around 900,000 domains were affected.

The problem was caused by an “incorrectly configured script” in an update of the .se domain, according to Pingdom, a Swedish web monitoring company.

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Apparently a single missing full stop at the end of the code meant that the Domain Name Systems (DNS) failed to recognise .se as the “top-level" (country-wide) domain.

The missing dot was not spotted during tests of the script. Once the software was running, surveillance systems noticed, and a new file created.

The new script was issued at 10:43pm local time. However, because the information on the old script was cached at internet service providers (ISPs), the web addresses remained broken until they flushed their systems. As many were outside Sweden and unaware of the problem, this may have taken some time.

Worse, because the .se system has a 24-hour delay before new scripts go live, some users may have been locked off the internet for a day or more.

It is not uncommon for single sites to have problems with their DNS, but it is enormously rare for an entire top-level domain to break.

Pingdom points out that, while it was bad enough for nearly a million Swedish domains to break, in a sense it was a lucky escape. If the same problem had struck the .com domain, more than 80 million domain names and all their dependent websites and email addresses would have been broken.

The Telegraph called the Swedish Embassy in London to ask for an estimate of the damage the problem caused to the country’s economy, but at the time of writing no-one was available to take the call.