How a Routine Key Rollover Took Down Germany's Internet: The .de DNSSEC Outage (opens in new tab)

On May 5, 2026, millions of .de domains became unreachable across large portions of the internet. The cause was not a cyberattack, not a cable cut, and not a server failure. It was a routine DNSSEC key rollover that went wrong at DENIC, the registry operator for Germany's .de country-code top-level domain, one of the largest on the planet with 17.9 million registered domains. The incident lasted several hours and affected every DNSSEC-validating resolver on the planet, including Cloudflare's ...