And all for the want of a full stop!

I’m sure many readers know the ancient doggerel:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Turns out that in terms of the Internet, a full stop can be just as powerful a thing to lose!

What was essentially a typo last night resulted in the temporary disappearance from the Internet of almost a million Web sites in Sweden — every address with a .se top-level down name.

. . .

“The .SE registry used an incorrectly configured script to update the .se zone, which introduced an error to every single .se domain name,” says Pingdom. “We have spoken to a number of industry insiders and what happened is that when updating the data, the script did not add a terminating ‘.’ to the DNS records in the .se zone. That trailing dot is necessary in the settings for DNS to understand that ‘.se” is the top-level domain. It is a seemingly small detail, but without it, the whole DNS lookup chain broke down.”

There’s more at the link.

In a later report, authorities have reminded Web users that e-mails sent to a .se address may be affected for a couple of days, not just an hour or two. Those of my readers in that part of the world might wish to take note, and follow up to make sure that anything important they’d sent was actually received.

Peter