Dear colleagues, In 2021, when reports emerged that hosts in Mexico were unable to reach whatsapp.net, it was determined that middleboxes were to blame. These devices were intercepting the queries to the root instance hosted in China and sending a bogus reply. Taking this as their starting point, Qasim Lone and colleagues have been investigating the prevalence of middleboxes using RIPE Atlas: https://labs.ripe.net/author/qasim-lone/detecting-dns-root-manipulation/ Best regards, Alun Davies RIPE Labs Editor RIPE NCC