RISKS Digest 19.25 (18 July 97)
“[On] 17 Jul 1997, a remarkable event occurred. The 4AM update of the root nameserver database was botched - horribly. The ... effect of this is that the Internet does not work right. In this episode, the top-level domains .com and .net have ceased to exist...
“The problem apparently began ... during the autogeneration of the NSI top-level domain zone files... Quality-assurance alarms were evidently ignored and the corrupted files were released at 2:30am EDT.”