Dear Nils, sorry to hear we have caused you some much problems. As the situation was we needed to perform an emergency shutdown of the update process to prevent corruption of the database after we detected some problems after a system crash. We did try to reach the community by sending out a mail to db-wg. We later realized that, contrary to the norm, we did not cc the lir-wg. We did send out a message (included below) to the lir-wg a few hours later trying to correct the situation. We realize this not what should have been done, but we are humans. During the outage, our home page (http://www.ripe.net) also had a note notifying the event. We do our best to try to keep a good service running and inform everyone affected when it is not possible to do so. What we mean by the reply you got from ncc@ripe.net is that mailbox replies only to requests and does not spam everyone. We use several wg lists to try to reach the interested parties. I hope you will accept our apologies and we promise to work harder to avoid circumstances like this in the future. ********** Begin included message Dear Colleagues, Due to a regretable oversight, the following message was not sent to this list last night. Due to a crash of our whois server, we had to stop the updates and re-index the data. There is no need to resend your updates. The updates are queued and they will be processed later. We are also going to upgrade the main server so that it can cope better with the ever growing load. The whois query service has been switched to our backup server, therefore the response time is slower than usual. The latest news is that the re-indexing process has finished and we are currently working on the main server itself. We anticipate that the full service will be restored sometime later today. We shall keep you informed. If you have anymore questions, please contact <ripe-dbm@ripe.net>. Regards, A. M. R. Magee ______________ RIPE NCC ********** End included message Yours sincerely, Joao Damas Head of external services RIPE NCC