Since yesterday, the servers running the EU Domain Registry have been experiencing serious problems, resulting in a complete outage today. The functionality of the EU domains themselves is not affected, but no domains can be registered or changed.
Yesterday’s news of a complete 45-minute outage of EURid’s servers referred to a widespread power failure at a data centre in Belgium caused by rain and subsequent flooding:
“Due to heavy rain and floods in Belgium this past weekend, the EURid data centre experienced a partial power failure during the early hours of Saturday, 13 November. This temporarily impacted some of the .eu services.
The registration system, DAS and WHOIS services were unavailable for approximately 45 minutes, before returning to full operation.“
Today the system has been unavailable for several hours. As a result of the power failure, hardware failures occurred. We are unable to communicate with the EU Domain Registry and therefore cannot process requests for orders, registrations, re-registrations and changes for all EU domains.
“Yesterday evening EURid experienced an issue with its registration system which resulted in the system going offline.
The registration system is still not available at this time.
The DNS infrastructure is not affected and .eu is resolving as usual. However, the registration system (EPP, Registrar Extranet, Registrar DAS and WHOIS) is currently offline (although the public WHOIS and DAS services are available).
The exact cause of the issue is being investigated. Initial findings suggest a combination of serious hardware failure and software bugs on the database system which are preventing the core database from functioning correctly.“
Once the problem is resolved, the pending operations will be performed.
The EU domains themselves are working, their DNS system is up and running.
We are a bit surprised that such a large organization, with such a large budget and such critical things, depends on one data center and apparently does not have geographically separated backup systems for exactly these cases.