For 4 days, the c-root server maintained by Cogent lost touch with its 12 peers.
The lag prompted engineers to delay work that had been scheduled for this week on the name servers that handle lookups for domain names ending in .gov and .int. The plan had been to update the servers’ DNSSEC to use ECDSA cryptographic keys. Without the ability for the new keys to be rolled out uniformly to all root servers, those plans had to be scrubbed.
The misperforming c-root coincided with another glitch that prevented many people from reaching the c-root website, which is also maintained by Cogent. Many assumed that the cause for both problems was the same. It later turned out that the site problems were the result of Cogent transferring the IP address used to host the site to Orange Ivory Coast, an African subsidiary of French telecom Orange.
Via Ars Technica