A global change set to break .nz domains

Today is DNS Flag Day, and that means domain names in the tens of thousands will break across the world.

What’s happening today is a global change to Domain Name System (DNS) software — this has been named DNS Flag Day. As a result, there will be a high number of domain names that are going to break across the world - New Zealand included.

InternetNZ Chief Executive, Jordan Carter, says this is a day that InternetNZ has been preparing for over six months.

“InternetNZ has been hard at work finding which .nz domains are set to break,” Carter says.

Back in July 2018, InternetNZ worked out that 8,349 .nz domain names were going to break on 1 February.

Today the number of domains that will break has decreased to only 508.

Some of the domain names that were set to break were high profile government agencies and banks. Ensuring these were fixed was a high priority for InternetNZ as it would have affected many New Zealanders.

“The team at InternetNZ, led by Chief Scientist Sebastian Castro, has put in the hard yards on this change. Being able to significantly decrease the number of broken .nz domains is a huge success for many New Zealanders,” says Carter.

InternetNZ and Domain Name Commission staff have been contacting registrars and DNS suppliers that could make changes to fix all of these affected domains. They were urged to look into the issues and make changes ahead of DNS Flag Day.

Countries such as Czech Republic, Chile and The Netherlands, were heavily involved in measuring and informing their customers about it.  

DNS Flag Day is happening because non-compliant DNS implementations in the wider Internet are preventing deployment of new features.

ENDS

For more information about DNS Flag day go to: https://dnsflagday.net/