At the moment, the German registry (Denic) is facing some serious problems. The website of the registry is extremely slow and also lots of German websites can’t be reached at the moment. So both the website of the registry and lots of regular German sites are down. We’ll keep an eye on this. It seems that all German domain names (.de names) which start with letters a through e can be reached again, the other names don’t seem to function at the moment. The problems started around 13:30 CET.
Update: The .de-registry is currently in the process of loading all the information into their nameservers again. This is taking some time. The domain names are being loaded in alphabetical order. Around this time (14:41 CET) they seem to have gotten to the letter “f”.
Update: According to some, domain names starting with letters “a” through “f” might not have been affected by this error at the .de-registry.