[neitsab]

Could you elaborate more on why propagation is not the right term? Its definition reads:

  The process of spreading to a larger area or greater number; dissemination.

Which is (to my understanding) exactly what happens with DNS information while clients fetch the updated zone.

72 hours is indeed a comfortable upper bound ("up to"), that we would give to customers so as to make absolutely sure every cache down the chain has refreshed its records, and is not the cause of the issue at hand when name servers were changed. 24 hours is common delay.

[fanf2]

"Propagate" is the traditional term for DNS update delays. It dates back to the era before NOTIFY and IXFR when it often took a long time for secondary servers to update their copies of a zone. Nowadays with a good setup that should happen within a few seconds.

Perhaps it is a bit of a misnomer to use it for cache timeouts, but it isn't particularly wrong or confusing unless you have a very pedantic reader.

[jsjohnst]

Propagate implies that the answer isn't readily available everywhere already. Instead of saying "up to 72hrs for DNS to propagate", it's much more accurate and just as easy to say "up to 72hrs for your DNS cache to refresh".

Am I being a bit pedantic? Sure, I'll admit that. But the reason I'm being pedantic is that this mischaracterization implies that there's nothing that can be done to prevent it. That is absolutely not true and if DNS is handled properly, you can get 99.99% or more of the world resolving with the correct records in under 1hr, with most of that being in under 15min. Excusing this as DNS propagation and not handling just looks lazy to me.

But what do I know, based on all the down votes apparently folks disagree with me so I'll gladly bow out from the conversation.