Eurid, the operator of the .eu registry, has suffered a serious outage.
According to official communications from the registry the systems were offline from last night until earlier today (though no official communication about the servers coming back online has been made)
How long was the registry offline?
By the looks of things it could be anything up to 12 hours, though I suspect more information on the outage will be forthcoming later.
Existing domain names were not impacted and DNS resolution continued as normal. However new registrations and updates were blocked.
UPDATE 1413
Eurid have provided more detail about the issue in an email to registrars.
“Yesterday evening’s registration system break down was caused by a massive memory bank failure in one of the two nodes that make up the .eu main database system. As a result, the operating system marked one third of all the available memory as non-operational.
Initial investigations indicate that the database system did not handle the memory bank failure in an optimal way. The database cluster was desynchronised and consequently stopped working.
In the meantime, the node with the failing memory has been deactivated and the registration system recovered to a point where no data has been lost.
“
