Nominet are still in the process of conducting upgrades to their registry provision and associated services systems. Jay Daley, chief IT bod at Nominet, recently stated
"With the release of the new Automaton there have been a number of bugs that have affected some registrars, for which we apologise. In some cases our testing has been inadequate, but for many these are triggered by a rare set of circumstances that were not part of our test data."
This has had some domainers brand the upgrade as a ‘farce‘ and questioning the ability of Nominet, likewise trying to define what ‘backwards compatible’ really means, for example it seems the new system errors out on added whitespace to automaton requests whereas the old system did not.
There has been a notice of downtime of Nominet systems on July 1st (a Sunday) to carry out ‘major work’ which we assume will be the final fix for the problems with the upgrade, and result in all services returning to normal.