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NEWS > EVERYONE ELSE > SWEDEN TEMPORARILY KNOCKED OFF THE PLANET
SWEDEN TEMPORARILY KNOCKED OFF THE PLANET
October 14 2009
Stockholm, Sweden – Despite jokes, Sweden has contributed many things to the world outside IKEA. Carl Nyberg for example invented he blowtorch. Johan Johansson invented the adjustable spanner. Those are just two of the many contributions the 
Swedes have given to the world outside carry-away furniture and an endearing member of the Muppet Show. Recently of course those contributions have lagged behind major nations such as the United States and Japan but for many the past holds a great deal of affection, and for the more than nine million people living in the country a source of national pride.
It was with mixed emotions then that the news that Sweden had dropped off the face of the planet was received. Though the exodus lasted only an hour and a half, the sudden disappearance of the country had many contemplating a world without them and for many it made little difference. The disappearance turned out to be a mistake by the registry service for the .SE top level domain name which accidently knocked the zone offline, leaving many websites including government services in a black hole and bringing speculation that the country had indeed simply ceased to exist, something which ultimately proved to not be the case to the delight of many and consternation of many more.
“The .SE registry used an incorrectly configured script to update the .se zone, which introduced an error to every single .se domain name,” said Web monitoring company Pingodom. “We have spoken to a number of industry insiders and what happened is that when updating the data, the script did not add a terminating '.' to the DNS records in the .se zone. That trailing dot is necessary in the settings for DNS to understand that '.se" is the top-level domain. It is a seemingly small detail, but without it, the whole DNS lookup chain broke down.”
The incident is expected to affect Swedish web traffic for at least two days. Government officials have assured the rest of the world that such an incident will not happen again in the future and that the country is here to stay, something particularly frustrating for neighbour Norway.
“We keep an eye on things regularly and for a little bit I thought that was it. That we had finally won. When I first heard about I tried every Swedish website I could think of and they were all down and I can’t tell you how excited I got but of course that was only temporary. Only because that high was so high the fall to reality was so much greater,” said an insider for the Norwegian government who preferred to remain anonymous. “I knew that there hadn’t been any kind of major cataclysm because we weren’t affected. What I had hoped, and what most Norwegians hope for regularly, is that somehow they had just vanished. That perhaps they had left all their infrastructure and fantastic furniture behind but the people gone, ready for us to move in. All those days of dreaming for a moment had come true, but alas it was not to be.”
Similar sentiments were echoed across Scandinavia with the governments of both Denmark and Finland grudgingly welcoming Stockholm back to the fray.
It wasn’t just neighbours though that had suspected that the country had suddenly disappeared. Many Swedes attempting to log onto their favourite sites suspected that something dreadful had happened, causing them to question their own existence.
“When I woke up today I just got this blank screen and I couldn’t figure out what was going on and then I tried non-Swedish sites and everything worked and I truly thought that we had been eliminated. I thought that maybe I was accessing the web from some netherworld, perhaps Valhalla, but then everything came back,” said Henrik Egner, 23, of Stockholm. “It was exciting and scary all at once. Ultimately, I’m glad we are still alive. I have a date with a really smoking girl tonight and I think, well let’s just say that I won’t even need that homepage tomorrow morning.”
IKEA is headquartered in The Netherlands. Officials there stated that should Sweden someday actually vanish from the planet supplies would not be affected.
Emil Uliya, International Correspondent
NEWS > EVERYONE ELSE > SWEDEN TEMPORARILY KNOCKED OFF THE PLANET
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