KUALA LUMPUR, June 16 — The restoration of access to websites using the .my domain names is being treated as “highest priority” but will still take time, sole administrator and federal agency MYNIC Berhad said today.

MYNIC also assured the public that there was no breach of data during the disruption in access to websites with domain names ending with .my.

“MYNIC’s quick-action team has put in the highest priority to restore affected services and monitor the situation. We have also obtained the help of Verisign and IANA to assist in the restoration of services.

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“No breach of customers’ data took place in this incident. The issue at hand is the availability of access to MYNIC’s domain services. The restoration service will take some time as to re-propagate the .my domain names to the world,” the company said in a statement just hours after the access problem was reported.

“MYNIC has always been working on safeguarding domain names and improving security, namely to enhance other layers of DNS validation to ensure end-to-end protection,” it added, referring to measures to enhance security.

In explaining the access problem, MYNIC confirmed that there was a “broken chain of trust between the servers in MYNIC and Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)”.

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“Our initial investigations found that the MYNIC signing server experienced outage. This caused the broken chain of trust between MYNIC and IANA server,” it said.

In the same statement, MYNIC also said it is collaborating with the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) for a holistic look of the situation.

MYNIC, which is an agency under the Communications and Multimedia Ministry, said it has received continuous support from the ministry in ensuring the development of domain name industry as part of Malaysia’s information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure.

The access issue was reported by the lowyat.net portal early today, when it said websites using the .my domain name are being affected by what appears to be DNS servers going offline.

Lowyat.net said some websites with the .my domain name may still accessible due to cached information in DNS resolvers globally, but said this will only last until the expiry of the caches.

Shortly before 5am this morning, MYNIC addressed the problem of inaccessible websites with the country-specific .my address, writing on Twitter that it was facing some “technical issues” that it is working hard to resolve as soon as possible.

On MYNIC’s website, it listed eight categories of websites under its administration, namely: Malaysian individuals and organizations (.my), commercial organisations (.com.my), network-related organisations (.net.my), other organisations (.org.my), Malaysian educational organisations (.edu.my), Malaysian government organisations (.gov.my), Malaysian military organisations (.mil.my) and Malaysian individuals’ personal use (.name.my).