What happens when a country's top-level domain goes down?

There's been some discussion lately about domain infrastructure stability, particularly around how DNSSEC configuration issues can affect entire regions' DNS services. If you've ever wondered about the technical backbone that keeps country-code TLDs like .de running smoothly, this seems like a good moment to explore it.

For those not deep in the weeds of DNS administration, DNSSEC is a security protocol meant to protect against DNS spoofing and hijacking. But like any complex system, misconfigurations can have widespread consequences. When things go wrong at the registry level, it's not just one website that's affected—it can potentially impact thousands of domains under that TLD.

Have any of you experienced issues accessing sites with certain country-code domains? Or do you work in hosting, IT operations, or domain management and have insights into how these outages get resolved? I'm curious about both the technical side and the real-world impact on businesses that rely on stable DNS infrastructure.

It also raises interesting questions: How much redundancy and failover protection should be in place for critical infrastructure like this? And what's the balance between security improvements like DNSSEC and the risk of introducing new failure points?