Libya Drops Off the Internet For Five Days

Libya's internet addresses stopped functioning for almost five days, before being reactivated yesterday. All URLs and email addresses ending in the domain .ly (cc-code extension for Libya) did not work between Friday and Tuesday.

Numerous .ly domain based websites and email accounts went off-air as a result. The chain 0f events is still some what unclear, but the intial findings seem to point to complete DNS service failure at the .ly domain space's caretaker Alshaeen for Information Technology -a Tripoli-based company reportedly operating out of London.

LyDomains.com, an United Kingdom based UK company that has exclusive rights to registering .ly names, had intially blamed the Internet Corp for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) of turning the .ly domains off, but they proved to be wrong. LyDomains.Com had informed its' customers last Friday, claiming that the disruption was caused by an "unilateral action" by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) -which is actually a function carried out by ICANN.

IANA maintains the list of entities (people and organizations) responsible for managing various country-code domains like .us, .uk, and .ly.

Apparently, first the primary name server for .ly had stopped responding, followed by their secondary name server (which was "slaved" to the primary DNS host) going dead-air, resulting in the entire .ly domains not getting resolved.

It is rather surprising that the entire .ly name space is being trusted to a single primary dns host slaved onto yet another single secondary domain name server.