Oops. It appears that a computer coding error introduced during routine maintenance brought down Sweden’s entire Internet. For an hour and a half last Monday night, Sweden’s top level domain, .se, experienced a blackout —meaning that access to any Web site or email ending in .se was crippled. Nearly a million domains were affected.

Computerworld reports:

“The .SE registry used an incorrectly configured script to update the .se zone, which introduced an error to every single .se domain name,” [Web monitoring company] Pingdom says. “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.”

If you’re getting worried, relax: The likelihood of such an error taking down all 80 million .com sites in its entirety is very very small, according to Pingdom—usually such an error affects only individual sites. Of course, a recent bill did grant the president permission to shut down the Internet here in the States if need be.

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Image: flickr/ Leia

Turns out robots are not always the hardworking, sensible employees that companies intend them to be. A robot in Sweden has now cost a company $3,000 in fines, after nearly costing one employee his life.

Two years ago, a factory worker was performing maintenance on a robot used to lift heavy rocks. Thinking he had cut the power supply, the man approached the robot, who apparently was not deprived of power at all, since he grabbed the man’s head and wouldn’t let go.

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