I believe the "outages" are due to the rate limiting system of the whois service, to stop data-mining. (And save you from getting dodgy registration notices in the mail) Basically any IP that is not in the whitelist gets dumped in the 'everyone else' ratelimit bucket, so when joe random spammer from $evil_place decides to mass-whois the .nz space, everyone get to wear the brunt of it blocking you out. The whois ratelimiting is there to stop people mining the database en-masse, registrars can access the XML service or have their whois source IP whitelisted - there are a number of registrars providing whois services via their website which use the XML service and there are appropriate captcha scripts to stop people mass-mining these.I'd suggest you find one of those if you really need to whois then and there, otherwise just give it a while and the rate limit will go away. I would however like to see an official message on here from the NZRS / DNC / InternetNZ / whoever wants to take ownership today as this does seem to be an ongoing issue and so far they haven't made a straight up official explanation (essentially what I've just described above) to everyone. Cheers, Blair