Sites down, Awaiting Netlify DNS

[luke]

The DNS zone for josephdumke.com at Netlify should be deleted because the domain is not using Netlify DNS so the DNS zone at Netlify is inactive. Inactive DNS zones are neither supported nor recommended as covered here:

[Support Guide] How to detect and fix inactive Netlify DNS zones

Last reviewed by Netlify Support - July, 2025 What is an “inactive Netlify DNS zone”? First, it would help to define the term “DNS zone”. Quoting wikipedia, it says: A DNS zone is any distinct, contiguous portion of the domain name space in the Domain Name System (DNS) for which administrative responsibility has been delegated to a single manager. To paraphrase, a DNS zone is a collection of all the DNS records for a production domain. When you add production domains to Netlify DNS we cre…

For some reason, Cloudflare is not returning any DNS records for the domain josephdumke.com (or www.josephdumke.com). However, I cannot see the Cloudflare configuration to determine why that is so.

Here is a recursive DNS lookup for josephdumke.com (and please note dig +trace output is invaluable when troubleshooting DNS issues):

$ dig +trace josephdumke.com A

; <<>> DiG 9.20.2 <<>> +trace josephdumke.com A
;; global options: +cmd
.			87203	IN	NS	m.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	d.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	h.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	j.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	i.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	l.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	a.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	c.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	b.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	k.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	f.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	e.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	NS	g.root-servers.net.
.			87203	IN	RRSIG	NS 8 0 518400 20241113170000 20241031160000 61050 . S5pijJpAcJYG3+WIYebXI8UHU7/8MDT2fhUZPu5T3DDd78fH9a6ichvL CorRzXTPv9c+wbQSIFM+Xb6EIcA4bqrbxbQqz9GflewsIa56hIhxqb3m tPkYQfwPCLY518kiZ9OTIUImqZ9m/I6jLVKrtsmTFD6jlNcV28a/oUOo 3rPWtNDXed5BCjatCsi/yg588J0zenG6rTE8trm+UVKLpiqST/o/pKli 7wTx0C41IZdIST4rhiuyDSSzUChdxjkTcH/8WfeXKOphsh3A/cAnBKZy JdwEDtxVNFAzFa/R1WprPEVgheKBQZIi7pPUa0d4Z6G3WzVSxK0BRxY6 MEAq0w==
;; Received 525 bytes from 8.8.8.8#53(8.8.8.8) in 30 ms

com.			172800	IN	NS	g.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	h.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	b.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	l.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	c.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	d.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	j.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	e.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	f.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	i.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	k.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	a.gtld-servers.net.
com.			172800	IN	NS	m.gtld-servers.net.
com.			86400	IN	DS	19718 13 2 8ACBB0CD28F41250A80A491389424D341522D946B0DA0C0291F2D3D7 71D7805A
com.			86400	IN	RRSIG	DS 8 1 86400 20241113170000 20241031160000 61050 . mRj9l6Xf3a0fx1R0RnAfMzy4ymu95VpVcLvMfbA006on5PzkIJKRVC4w qDScV8eIDF1SdhuARDTKLPk7e+kgWYa76xtUkiDEUaXYC/F3qHTKO9rU yo+zGRQSE7NCloBO76VCgtDhBS1gz0L3M2oYVxShOO947odr9uZBqfW0 PaW9pmQHAGrp1/HWvHDOZwDhOI5tjXgjz4ISIWMKpDCcj6DStSr4WQ85 9i2PjFd3RmIcCx3KqtnJO7CGBcBSD07aqR3/HLoFPIu24WuIUekJwZfG s10AxohnbwGVugPWdhvQmRckA+RQUl/3Q8kMv4x5XCZ4e7F3KpFrt0L4 9uybzQ==
;; Received 1203 bytes from 192.36.148.17#53(i.root-servers.net) in 89 ms

josephdumke.com.	172800	IN	NS	boyd.ns.cloudflare.com.
josephdumke.com.	172800	IN	NS	penny.ns.cloudflare.com.
CK0POJMG874LJREF7EFN8430QVIT8BSM.com. 900 IN NSEC3 1 1 0 - CK0Q3UDG8CEKKAE7RUKPGCT1DVSSH8LL NS SOA RRSIG DNSKEY NSEC3PARAM
CK0POJMG874LJREF7EFN8430QVIT8BSM.com. 900 IN RRSIG NSEC3 13 2 900 20241104002556 20241027231556 29942 com. 91X1yPcVakmmDBB4610js+PlS6tsWXkckWFbTVELLHTxMPp59zhHBr4l tmpQNcq+1jif9HVX3wzuMqzt562zlw==
K1SB46K1ROC96GVI4T67R5I2Q7CNGNA9.com. 900 IN NSEC3 1 1 0 - K1SBPLNKM4C5Q9FDB44ON0UBJI537EG0 NS DS RRSIG
K1SB46K1ROC96GVI4T67R5I2Q7CNGNA9.com. 900 IN RRSIG NSEC3 13 2 900 20241107021638 20241031010638 29942 com. xXGgROLzoxbJiQnElyCBW3njKwV7gp+1DP0yq1zM6MBmmIj2JOOiql47 3iEcx4g6c86QJIj3xepwsctc37Z/NQ==
;; Received 718 bytes from 2001:503:83eb::30#53(c.gtld-servers.net) in 86 ms

josephdumke.com.	1800	IN	SOA	boyd.ns.cloudflare.com. dns.cloudflare.com. 2355887072 10000 2400 604800 1800
;; Received 103 bytes from 2803:f800:50::6ca2:c14b#53(boyd.ns.cloudflare.com) in 20 ms

I requested the A record for josephdumke.com above but the Cloudflare name server (boyd.ns.cloudflare.com) returned an SOA type record instead. Returning SOA records is default behavior when a name server does not have the record being requested. The name server cannot return the requested record and it sends an SOA type record instead.

To summarize, there is still some DNS issue at Cloudflare for the domain josephdumke.com. I cannot see what the reason for that is, but the Cloudflare DNS is not working for this domain currently.

I think what happened here is that the Cloudflare UI “wizard” auto-detected the IP addresses that were being by the domains at the time and then hardcoded the IP addresses into the config at Cloudflare. However, that is always wrong for sites hosted at Netlify. Cloudflare should always use the CNAME target of <site name here>.netlify.app and never a hard coded IP address when the site Cloudflare proxies to is hosted at Netlify. Some people may have manually hardcoded the IP addresses but most people probably got into this incorrectly configured state via the UI wizard.