The Illusion of Five Nines

In most industries, service providers boast about five nines availability — 99.999%. That sounds impressive: just five minutes of downtime per year.

But DNS isn’t like most industries. For top-level domains, downtime is not acceptable. If a registry goes dark, hospitals, banking systems, and e-commerce all go offline with it. Government portals couldn’t deliver essential services. Businesses stop transacting. And people are no longer able to connect, communicate, or pay.

As one operator put it:

“Not even five minutes.”

Availability is Binary

DNS is either there or it isn’t. There’s no grey zone. For operators, 100% uptime isn’t a marketing target — it’s the baseline expectation.

The real challenge isn’t hitting 100% on a monitoring dashboard. It’s what happens when systems fail under pressure. Because failure is inevitable.

Stability vs. Resilience

For years, many DNSSEC systems have been considered “stable” because they haven’t failed yet. But stability and resilience aren’t the same.

• Stability means it hasn’t broken.
• Resilience means you can recover fast when it does.

Without transferability, observability, and lifecycle support, uptime becomes fragile — a single point of failure waiting to happen.

Why Operators Are Rethinking DNSSEC

In interviews with sixteen TLDs, we heard the same story: uptime alone is no longer enough.

Operators are now asking:

• Can a new engineer take over if someone leaves?
• Can we see what’s happening in the chain at every stage?
• Do we have documented support and lifecycle plans?
• Can we explain our resilience to auditors, not just engineers?

From Uptime to Recovery

The real SLA isn’t “five nines.” It’s never down.

That doesn’t mean failures won’t happen. It means systems must be designed to fail in controlled ways and recover quickly, without relying on hero ops — a single expert carrying the system in their head, with continuity depending on memory instead of process.

Here's what sixteen TLD operators all agree on: The future of DNSSEC isn’t measured by stability. It’s measured by resilience.

Coming Next

We interviewed sixteen TLD operators to understand what keeps them up at night.

The full report drops Tuesday, September 9.