.cd registry becomes abandoned ghost ship adrift

Without anybody noticing, the .cd-registry recently became an abandoned ghost registry adrift. For many years, the registry was run by one person who originated from Congo, but is now employed by a South-African university. According to contacts with the Congolese government, they wanted to bring back the management of the .cd domain space to within Congo and the South-African administrator left the ship abandoned before a take-over could be arranged.

Nobody seems to know when exactly the registry administrator closed the door behind him, because the registry software did keep on running. In the course of August however the link between the registry software and the nameservers stopped working. With nobody on the job to fix the connection, it was still possible to administratively register new domain names, but new registrations would never become technically active. The nameserver-information has not been changed since a certain time in August, but any information that was already in the .cd zone file before that time, remains active.

It currently is very much unclear what the future of the .cd-namespace will bring. If the previous administrator doesn’t come back into the picture, it will be very hard for any successor to be able to compile an accurate overview of current .cd domain names to import into any new registration environment.