Problem accessing .de domains?

[#1]

If you've been having difficulty accessing .de domains this afternoon then this will be why.
It's currently stopping me from renewing one of my domains as the third party that looks after it uses a merchant provider hosted at a .de address
Edit: just about to post this to Service Status:
[quote author="Service Status"]Problems accessing domains ending .de - NEW
We have recently become aware of an outage affecting the TLD servers responsible for the German .de 'zone'.
Whilst this problem is outside of our control, you may find that you're unable to access certain websites that end in .de
As soon as we've received notice that the problem is fixed, we'll close this Service Status thread.
Kind Regards,
Bob Pullen
Customer Support

[#2]

And just to clarify on that, it's not just affecting Plusnet - the entire .DE TLD  (Top Level Domain) is currently experiencing intermittent problems, so it will affect anyone trying to access a .de domain from anywhere in the world.

[barry@yourwife ~]# dig www.twonkymedia.de
; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_4.2 <<>> www.twonkymedia.de
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NXDOMAIN, id: 6903
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 1, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.twonkymedia.de.            IN      A
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
de.                     7200    IN      SOA     f.nic.de. its.denic.de. 2010051253 7200 7200 3600000 7200
;; Query time: 130 msec
;; SERVER: 82.197.83.198#53(82.197.83.198)
;; WHEN: Wed May 12 14:53:04 2010
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 88

[barry@yourwife ~]# dig www.twonkymedia.de
; <<>> DiG 9.3.6-P1-RedHat-9.3.6-4.P1.el5_4.2 <<>> www.twonkymedia.de
;; global options:  printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 4156
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 3, ADDITIONAL: 3
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;www.twonkymedia.de.            IN      A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
www.twonkymedia.de. ;    38400   IN      CNAME   drsancluster1.pv.com.
drsancluster1.pv.com.   38400   IN      A       63.241.31.144
;; AUTHORITY SECTION:
pv.com.                 38400   IN      NS      ns3.pv.com.
pv.com.                 38400   IN      NS      ns1.pv.com.
pv.com.                 38400   IN      NS      ns2.pv.com.
;; ADDITIONAL SECTION:
ns1.pv.com.             38400   IN      A       63.241.31.131
ns2.pv.com.             38400   IN      A       66.73.94.8
ns3.pv.com.             38400   IN      A       63.241.31.147
;; Query time: 535 msec
;; SERVER: 82.197.83.198#53(82.197.83.198)
;; WHEN: Wed May 12 14:54:14 2010
;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 188
[barry@yourwife ~]#

[#3]

Should now be fixed, I'll leave the SS thread open until the end of the day and then close it assuming no further problems crop up.

[#4]

can access barrys .de link on this Post office connection so seems to be fixed

[#5]

I'm still having probs with ipayment.de so perhaps that's caused by something else? I've a support ticket open with Fasthosts anyways so we'll see what they say...
Edit: just tried again and it's working
Edit again: Service Status post cleared.
[quote author="Service Status"]Problems accessing domains ending .de - RESOLVED
The problems affecting the TLD servers for the .de 'zone' have now been resolved and you should be able to browse to .de websites again without any problems.
Kind Regards,
Bob Pullen
Customer Support