404: Germany Not Found
Traffic suddenly increased. Websites disappeared. Here’s what network behavior revealed during Germany’s .de DNSSEC incident.
Late on the night of May 5, 2026, in Germany, sysadmins’ pulses picked up a little, when they discovered their website was unreachable. After searching their network for the problem, they turned to the web for answers. Turns out, they weren’t the only ones with a problem.
What was going on?
DENIC, the managing entity of the .de TLD, issued DNS responses with incorrect signatures. Consequently, DNSSEC-validating resolvers were failing to resolve .de domains.
Traffic from DENIC started to increase at around 19:30 UTC and normalized at approx. 22:30 (closely matching Cloudflare Radar’s observations). This increased traffic was caused by resolvers continuing trying to resolve .de domains but failing to do so.
Phew!
To quote Redditor jamesthethirteenth:
It’s not you.
It’s a botched scheduled maintenance window at the German national TLD registry.
Bahn (the federal railway) and Chip (huge tech publication) are down with you.
DENIC themselves can’t receive email about it.
Ouch.
The problem has now been resolved and all resolvers are resolving as normal again.