On May 5, 2026, millions of .de domains became unreachable across large portions of the internet. The cause was not a cyberattack, not a cable cut, and not a server failure. It was a routine DNSSEC key rollover that went wrong at DENIC, the registry operator for Germany's .de country-code top-level domain, one of the largest on the planet with 17.9 million registered domains. The incident lasted several hours and affected every DNSSEC-validating resolver on the planet, including Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, Google Public DNS, and countless ISP resolvers. Major German services went down: Amazon.de, DHL, Deutsche Bahn's ticketing system, banking apps like N26, eBay, Web.de, mainstream news outlets, and government portals all became unreachable. Thousands of outage reports flooded Downdetector's German site, and users across Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Sweden reported complete loss of connectivity to .de domains. As one security researcher put it: "No hacker attack. No provider problem.…