DENIC messed up their DNS servers today rendering most of the domains in .de unreachable. In technical terms requests to their servers either timed out or returned a NXDOMAIN answer, which states that the domain does not exists.

Kristian Köhntopp came up with the following URL to the DENIC homepage:

http://www.denic.de/typo3temp/pics/i_64bbbffdb3.jpg

I think if this is what DENIC considers to be a domain it's really astonishing that .de did not break earlier Ironically, this site may not be reachable right now.