DNS Propagation Checker

Asks twelve public DNS resolvers on several continents for the same record and shows which ones have your change and which are still serving the old answer.

All twelve are queried at once, directly — not through this server's own resolver — so what you see is genuinely what each of them is handing out right now.

How it works

"Propagation" is a misleading word. Nothing is pushed anywhere: your authoritative nameservers hold the record, and every other resolver in the world simply asks them when it needs to, then caches the answer for as long as the record's TTL says it may. What people call propagation delay is just those caches expiring at different moments.

That single fact explains almost everything about the experience. A resolver that fetched your old record 30 seconds before you changed it will keep serving that old value for the full TTL — an hour, four hours, a day — no matter what your nameservers now say. A resolver that happened to have nothing cached gets the new value immediately. So a mixed result below is normal and expected mid-change, not a sign anything is broken.

The practical consequence is that the time to plan is before the change. Lower the TTL to 300 seconds a day or two ahead — long enough that every cache holding the old long TTL has expired and picked up the short one. Then make the change, and the world follows within five minutes. Raise the TTL again afterwards, because a permanently low TTL means more lookups and a slightly slower site for everyone.

Two things genuinely take longer and are worth separating from ordinary caching. Changing your nameservers at the registrar goes through the TLD zone, whose records typically carry a 48-hour TTL, and you cannot shorten that. And a handful of ISP resolvers disregard short TTLs entirely, enforcing a minimum of their own — which is why one or two entries below occasionally lag long after everyone else has updated.

If every resolver here returns nothing, the problem is not propagation. Either the record does not exist, or your nameservers are not answering — check the record directly against your authoritative servers before waiting any longer.

Frequently asked questions