Anguilla is an island in the Caribbean. It’s also the home to the .ai country code domain name. With “AI” being such a hot topic over the last few years the country code has attracted quite a bit of attention from users with no links to the island.
Unfortunately it appears as if the island has been cut off from the rest of the global internet due to a fibre cut. NetBlocks report the issue was caused by damage to an undersea cable and that the island’s connection to the outside world has been impacted since Saturday February 18th 2023:
At present the connection is still down.
So what about .ai domain names?
The DNS is global, so unless all the nameservers being used by the .ai registry were “in country” then registered .ai domain names would still keep working.
According to the IANA registry the .ai country code domain registry uses:
- LACTLD’s ANYCAST DNS cloud
- CZ Nic’s ANYCAST (run by the Czech domain name registry)
- Packeting Clearing House’s ANYCAST
At the moment .ai domain names should be working fine – as long as they aren’t physically hosted in Anguilla.
The .ai registry’s website appears to be unreachable and their EPP servers are also offline, which means that updates and new registrations are currently not possible.
UPDATE: The registry and other services based on the island came back online Monday evening Irish time.
