If you’ve been seeing weird network issues over the last few days, like people suddenly only being able to reach servers via FQDN, you can thank AVM for that one.
They added a wildcard A record for *.fritz.box pointing to 127.0.0.1 (instead of returning NXDOMAIN).
Apparently, macOS systems behind a FritzBox are especially confused by this, even when connected to a company network via VPN and getting a new DNS entry there.
It’s always DNS .
This SEEMS to be a recent change:
https://www.borncity.com/blog/2025/10/22/fritzbox-7490-und-os-7-61-und-fritz-box-liefert-ploetzlich-127-0-0-1-statt-nxdomain/ (German article)
I just helped a customer during a major incident where this turned out to be the root cause: many systems had shortnames configured everywhere.
Funny side effect: from the command line (Terminal) it’s hard to debug, since DNS resolution apparently works differently there than when you try to mount a share in Finder.


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