RIPE Network Coordination Centre incident
NRTM and Split files : Not working
Resolved after 5 hours 22 minutes, affecting RIPE Database and Reverse DNS, on August 4, 2026.
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.
Affected components
Update timeline
- monitoring Aug 04, 2026, 10:24 AM UTC
Aug 4, 12:24 CEST Investigating - We are currently investigating an issue with NRTM and Split files.
- investigating Aug 04, 2026, 10:24 AM UTC
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.
- investigating Aug 04, 2026, 11:53 AM UTC
We are continuing to investigate this issue.
- investigating Aug 04, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC
All pending domain object updates have been processed and published.
- monitoring Aug 04, 2026, 02:51 PM UTC
A fix has been implemented and we are monitoring the results.
- resolved Aug 04, 2026, 03:46 PM UTC
This incident has been resolved.
- postmortem Aug 13, 2026, 01:02 PM UTC
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.
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