Sweden Disappears from the Internet

October 14, 2009 in Internet

By missing a dot in the .se domain name, all Swedish sites disappeared from the internet, causing a dramatic reduction of pictures of blond people online. The problem came when maintenance to Domain Name Systems damaged every .se web address on Monday night.

A script error used to update the .se domain led to the missing dot to be introduced into every single domain name, resulting in the system failing to understand that .se was the top level domain.

Every one of the 900,000 .se names were affected, including email addresses.