.mu is the country code top level domain (ccTLD) for the Republic of Mauritius. In 1995, Dr Jon Postel delegated the .mu ccTLD to Mr Yann Kwok. The current sponsoring organization is Internet Direct Ltd.
The current name servers, used by the domain name system (DNS), for the .mu ccTLD are:
On 29 September, there was a report about two of the name servers for the .mu ccTLD "are currently down". I verified the report:
I can reach (anycast1.irondns.net (;; Received 202 bytes from 195.253.64.5#53(anycast1.irondns.net) in 285 ms) and fork.sth.dnsnode.net (;; Received 202 bytes from 77.72.229.254#53(fork.sth.dnsnode.net) in 242 ms). I cannot resolve any of the tld.mu nameservers:
nic.mu. 43200 IN NS ns4.tld.mu.
nic.mu. 43200 IN NS ns1.tld.mu.
nic.mu. 43200 IN NS ns5.tld.mu.
nic.mu. 43200 IN NS ns3.tld.mu.
nic.mu. 43200 IN NS ns2.tld.mu.
The problem also affected gov.mu because of udns1.tld.mu and udns2.tld.mu.:
mu. 172800 IN NS anycast1.irondns.net.
mu. 172800 IN NS udns1.tld.mu.
mu. 172800 IN NS udns2.tld.mu.
mu. 172800 IN NS fork.sth.dnsnode.net.
The Whois record for the tld.mu domain is as follows:
Domain Name: tld.mu
Domain ID: 76580-CoCCA
WHOIS Server:
Referral URL:
Updated Date: 2013-01-09T19:50:14.303Z
Creation Date: 2002-09-14T14:00:00.000Z
Registry Expiry Date: 2033-09-14T14:00:00.000Z
Sponsoring Registrar: Mauritius Domains
Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID:
Domain Status: clientUpdateProhibited
Domain Status: clientRenewProhibited
Domain Status: serverUpdateProhibited
Domain Status: clientDeleteProhibited
Domain Status: serverDeleteProhibited
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
Domain Status: serverRenewProhibited
Domain Status: ok
Domain Status: serverTransferProhibited
Name Server: ns1.tld.mu
Name Server: ns2.tld.mu
Name Server: ns3.tld.mu
Name Server: ns4.tld.mu
Name Server: ns5.tld.mu
DNSSEC: unsigned
Additional Section
Sponsoring Registrar URL:
Sponsoring Registrar Address: Mauritius
Sponsoring Registrar Country: MU
Sponsoring Registrar Phone:
Sponsoring Registrar Fax:
Sponsoring Registrar Customer Service Contact: Mauritius Domains
Sponsoring Registrar Customer Service Email:
There wasn't any contact information to notify the administrator of the tld.mu name servers about the DNS issue. The Ministry of Information and Communication Technology was notified about the DNS issue on 2 October:
I did some research and it showed that it affected at least the following sites:
www.google.mu
www.gov.mu
www.icta.mu
www.ionnews.mu
www.lexpress.mu
www.mcb.mu
www.ncb.mu
www.orange.mu
www.sbmgroup.mu
www.uom.ac.mu
www.yelo.mu
The impact was fortunately not noticeable within Mauritius. However, the fact that all domain names under .mu were affected for over twelve hours is a concern. The lack of information about the downtime of two of the nameservers (used for the .mu ccTLD) should, in my humble opinion, be a wake up call about a possible outage of .mu in future.