The .eu top-level domain, managed by EURid, marked its 20th anniversary on April 7, 2026, celebrating two decades since its public launch in 2006. This milestone highlights over 3.8 million registrations and its role as a trusted European digital identity for citizens, businesses, and institutions.
By Creatives Unite Newsroom
The .eu domain launched in 2005 with registrations starting April 7, 2006, seeing over 1 million registrations in the first 24 hours. It supports variants like .ею (Cyrillic) and .ευ (Greek) and remains a symbol of openness, security, and pan-European cooperation. With over 3.8 million registrations, .eu is the fourth-largest country-code TLD in Europe, the ninth globally, and continues with its steady growth. Since its launch, .eu has never experienced any outages, running smoothly for 20 years without a single disruption—a testament to its reliability and security. Furthermore, in an era of rising cyber threats, .eu has prioritised security and abuse prevention, investing in AI-driven fraud detection to block malicious registrations and stringent data quality checks to maintain a clean namespace.
The twenty years journey of .eu has also been marked by some memorable moments, including a record-breaking launch on 7 April 2006, with over 1 million registrations in the first 24 hours, and the introduction of internationalised domain names (IDNs) in 2009 allowing non-Latin scripts, followed by the launch of .ею (Cyrillic) in 2016 and .ευ (Greek) in 2019, making the domain truly multilingual.
EURid is hosting EuroDIG 2026 on May 26-27 in Brussels' Charlemagne Building, themed “European Voices for the Future of the Internet – Celebrating 20 Years of .eu” as a hybrid, free event focused on internet governance. The event will feature a keynote speech by Executive Vice President Henna Virkkunen and a variety of collaborative sessions on key topics such as protecting the European online public space, digital sovereignty, the future of internet governance and the impact of new and emerging technologies on the internet. It will also feature a Youth track and intergenerational dialogue.
Additional activities include the ".eu Rail Connect" promotional journey across Europe and discussions on digital supply chains.
