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To be fair, it’s not their DNS that is unavailable, it’s just their Whois server. Whois, while it can be considered an essential service, is not meant to be critical infrastructure. Whois is only meant to be accessed manually by humans (which is enforced by rate limits), and the format of its output is completely free-form, i.e. not machine parseable in the general case.

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It does mean all registrations, renewals and changes to ~250 TLDs are out of action though.

None of those are done via Whois. If what you say is true, then it must mean that they have taken down more than their Whois service, and have suspended EPP access as well.

You're right of course that Whois isn't involved in those things. Other comments indicate it's scheduled maintenance, which means EPP is down and most registrars have status updates out indicating changes to these TLDs are unavailable.

Which is not that uncommon. Registries undergo maintenance all the time. The only thing that is really impacted is the ability to register new domains and use them immediately.

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