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Wednesday saw the German internet suffer problems for over an hour and many business users were unable to access the internet or their websites. DENIC, the German internet authority, attributed this problem to the uploading of empty zonefiles.

According to reports, the problem affected the German .de domain names. .de domain names account for 13.6 million German domains, so many sites were affected. Some claimed that all .de domains were down and others claimed that only some of them were down. One thing’s for sure – it wasn’t too good for business!

Icann, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has made internationalised domain names (IDNs) available, which is the first time this has happened. Because of Icann’s fast track process, the three first country-code-top-level domains (ccTLDs) were placed into the DNS root zone a couple of days ago for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.

This means that countries can now apply to Icann for IDN ccTLDs in scripts other than Latin and so far the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has received twenty one requests for this in eleven different languages.