More than 81,000 British .eu domain names have been put on hold after Brexit

81,470 British .eu domain names and associated email addresses were put on hold on January 1, 2021. The domain names do not meet the new criteria of the European domain manager and will be deleted at the latest on March 31, 2021.

The websites and e-mail addresses are not yet removed, but have been put on inactive. This prevents administrators from using their website and email addresses. Until March 31, 2021, administrators have time to meet the required criteria of the European domain administrator EURID.

Those requirements have been amended a few times since the Brexit negotiations. According to the most recently established rules of the European Commission, the owner of a .eu domain name must be a European resident or an entity in an EU Member State. An EU citizen residing in the United Kingdom keeps his .eu domain name. A Brit living in an EU country will not lose his domain name either. This is a relaxation compared to the first version of the regulations, which stated that all .eu domain names linked to a British or British address were automatically stopped.

According to news site The Register, there were approximately 317,000 British .eu domains in 2018. That number dropped quickly by transferring the domain names to an address in the European Union or to an EU resident. On January 1, 2021, the remaining 81,470 British .eu domain names that remained were put on hold, after multiple warnings from the European domain administrator.