[Support Guide] Workaround for 'invalid domain name' and other DNS errors 14-15 Oct

Between 14 Oct at 14:29 UTC and 15 Oct 16:10 UTC, our systems began returning sporadic errors when attempting to add a new domain to our DNS Hosting while applying a hostname to a website. They largely looked like this:

We have now fixed the root cause so new domains will be added correctly.

However, it is possible (but not guaranteed) that if you attempted to configure a new domain for a site, that things have remained in a broken state for the affected site. To be clear, this broken state would look like an inability to look up your hostname or connect to it: by that we mean: “couldn’t resolve hostname” type errors in the browser rather than “connected but received a 404 page or other visually incorrect content”.

If you find yourself in this state - browser cannot connect, and our UI shows something like this:

…then, the best fix is to remove the domain from the Site’s domain settings page like this:

and then re-add it.

In case this doesn’t work, please respond to this thread with your domain (x.com) and sitename (insightful-ginsburg-123456), so our team can take a closer look and try to help you fix things up.

Please note that it is also possible that you received this error but it did not turn out to impact your site service, since you were not intending to configure our DNS hosting. (Many people accidentally set this up with a site). In this case - assuming Netlify is serving your site well under all names that you configured - you need take no action.

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