[kijin]

According to the story, it took somewhere between 13 and 19 hours for passport.com to resolve properly after he renewed it for Microsoft. Is that normally how long it takes to reactivate a domain name that has gone into a renewal grace period, or was something different back then?

Perhaps the NXDOMAIN response was cached by ISPs for an especially long time because it was such a frequently visited hostname?

[DanielDent]

It used to be that nameserver changes with TLDs were measured in days, not minutes. Even today some TLDs continue to operate this way.

[evolve2k]

What are reasonable timeframe expectations for nameserver changes now?

[DaiPlusPlus]

That depends on the TTL of your DNS records. But if it’s a brand-new registration for a dot-com then I’ve found DNS queries work within 3 minutes of me completing GoDaddy’s regustration (and using GoDaddy’s DNS zone hosting) even through my ISP’s DNS servers (provided there’s no cached NXDOMAIN results).

[DanielDent]

The .com zone file is updated every few minutes. Caching behaviours will vary significantly. Frequently a significant fraction of traffic can be using new nameservers within minutes, with a long tail of traffic with older information.

Each TLD does their own thing. For example, last time I checked, .ca only seemed to be serving a new zone file every few hours. How long new nameservers take will depend on your luck in terms of where you are in their refresh cycle.

[orisho]

NXDOMAIN is often cached for much longer because it's assumed not to change soon. Sometimes, as in this case, that's a wrong assumption.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I thought NXDOMAIN results were cached for as long as the TTL in the parent SOA record?

[yrro]

For com. that's currently 24 hours!