IANA explains example.com change, warns off uptime checks

The organization that runs example.com changed the page on September 28, 2026, and then explained why in an email published on September 30. IANA split the page into a basic HTML file and a separate JavaScript file to cut bandwidth, because most visitors are machines. It also repeated a warning that matters to anyone who writes tests or monitoring: example.com is not a service to rely on.

IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, maintains example.com and example.org. The domains exist so that manuals, tutorials and sample config files have a safe address to show.

What changed on example.com

The page has been almost frozen for years, so even small edits get noticed. The latest one added text in six languages, according to DebugBear, which tracks the page's history. The text cycles through English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish every five seconds, next to a small book icon.

DebugBear lists the earlier changes too:

Date	Change
July 29, 2013	Moved from an Apache server to the EdgeCast content delivery network
October 17, 2019	Updated font list with better fallback fonts
October 9, 2025	Major redesign; card layout removed and HTML minified
June 9, 2026	Moved to Cloudflare
September 28, 2026	Six-language text, cycling every five seconds

Why IANA made the change

Developer Oliver Dunk asked IANA about the change and published its reply. IANA Vice President Kim Davies wrote that changes aim to "reduce the overall bandwidth demands of serving the site, or improve its utility."

The split into HTML and JavaScript serves that goal. Most traffic to example.com comes from automated systems that never load the JavaScript file. Those bots now download only the small HTML page. Human visitors still get the full page.

Davies also said IANA runs the web server only "as a courtesy." The domain's real job is to be a placeholder in documentation, not a live endpoint.

Why so many machines visit

Example domains attract a steady flood of automated traffic. Some comes from sample config files that people copy and forget to change. Some comes from code that uses the domain to check whether the internet is reachable.

Cloudflare measured the effect in 2023 with a typo of the name, exmaple.com. That domain received 2.48 billion HTTP requests over 12 months, Cloudflare reported. Misconfigured systems, routers and monitoring tools such as Nagios sent much of it.

What IANA's rules say

IANA's own help page, last revised September 27, 2026, is direct. "We strongly recommend you do not design applications that require the example domains to have operating HTTP service," it says. The domains are reserved under RFC 2606 and RFC 6761, two internet standards documents. They cannot be registered or transferred.

What this means for developers

Search your code for example.com. Look in health checks, startup scripts, test suites and container images. Any code that fetches the page and expects a reply depends on a courtesy service that IANA says not to rely on.

Replace connectivity checks with an endpoint you control. A check against your own server, or a provider that offers a status endpoint, tells you more. It also will not change when IANA edits a web page.

Do not assert on the page's content. A test that compares the HTML, its length or its title will break each time IANA edits the page. The site's setup has changed twice this year, in June and September.

Mock outside calls in unit tests. If a test only needs a URL that responds, serve one from a local test server. Your tests then stay fast and pass without network access.

Keep using example.com in documentation. That is still what it is for. Sample configs, tutorials and README files should keep pointing at it, so readers never hit a real company's site by accident.