Many websites under the .au domain, including those run by News Corp, Nine and the Victorian Government, were shut down on Tuesday afternoon, creating confusion among users.
It seems internet outages are becoming a part of our daily routine. After Apple’s services stopped operating early on Tuesday morning, over 15,000 Australian websites went down later that day for about an hour, while the main cause behind this matter is yet to be determined.
At around 4:30 pm a number of users began reporting issues as they attempted to access several websites under the .au domain with the largest amount of daily traffic, such as those run by News Corp, the Nine Corporation or the AFL. The sites were down for about an hour until finally they began operating as usual.
The issue was cause by an error in the Domain Name System, yet could not be pinpointed by auDA, the company that operates the .au domain, with a representative saying that they’re researching the issue.
“We regret that a small number of domains were affected but are pleased to report the .au is back up and operating,” the representative said. “An investigation as to the cause of this issue is under way.”
The outage occurred only a few days away from the launch of the .au top level domain, during which website addresses will become available as .au without anything in between (such as .com or .org,) but it is yet to be determined if this issue had anything to do with the new domain.
