Major incident

RIPE NCC: NRTM and Split files : Not working

Affected: RIPE Database, Reverse DNS

Current status of RIPE NCC: Minor issues — live RIPE NCC status

Timeline

1. Aug 4, 2026, 10:24 UTC
   investigating
   We are currently investigating an issue with NRTM and Split files. This also affects reverse DNS provisioning, because it relies on NRTM. Updates made to "domain" objects in the RIPE Database are not appearing in the global DNS.
2. Aug 4, 2026, 11:53 UTC
   investigating
   We are continuing to investigate this issue.
3. Aug 4, 2026, 12:46 UTC
   investigating
   All pending domain object updates have been processed and published.
4. Aug 4, 2026, 14:51 UTC
   monitoring
   A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.
5. Aug 4, 2026, 15:46 UTC
   resolved
   This incident has been resolved.
6. Aug 13, 2026, 13:02 UTC
   postmortem
   Between approximately 00:06 UTC on Sunday, 2 August 2026 and 12:30 UTC on Tuesday, 4 August 2026, there was an issue affecting the RIPE Database NRTM mirroring service. The root cause was an invalid RPSL object being added to the RIPE Database, which in turn caused the NRTM service to stop working when it reached this object. This invalid response caused NRTM clients to desynchronise from the RIPE Database from this point onwards. A code change was introduced in Whois release 1.122 in April, which inadvertently allowed additional newlines in “descr:” and “remarks:” attributes. This resulted in an invalid RPSL object being written in the database. We have changed the UTF-8 code point substitution to no longer write additional newlines. Additionally, the NRTM server did not skip over invalid RPSL objects, but failed with an “internal error occurred”. We have now changed this behaviour to skip invalid RPSL and log an error. If this happens in future the DB team will take action to correct the invalid RPSL so the update will appear later in the NRTM stream. Both of these issues will be fixed in the upcoming Whois 1.124 release, due on Thursday, 27 August 2026. We have also improved the monitoring of the NRTM service, which will now also request a recent range of updates from the NRTM server and validate the response.

Updates as published by RIPE NCC (original).