What does 127.0.53.53 mean? It’s a system alert notification thing.

When you, as a system administrator / network administrator, notice the IP address 127.0.53.53 in your network / system log, this is intended to alert your network is doing something unexpected. This is an alert system derived by ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) and more information about what network admins should do to stop these alerts can be found at icann.org/namecollision – This incident is important to pay attention to, as indicated by this Google Ad being run:

127-0-53-53

For more background information, see the announcement: ICANN Approves Name Collision Occurrence Management Framework | Special IP Address (127.0.53.53) Alerts System Administrators of Potential Issue (01 Aug 2014).

And, this ComputerWorld article ICANN seeks to tackle DNS namespace collision risks: Prepare to watch sysadmins freak out over 127.0.53.53 appearing in logs

Instead of the familiar 127.0.0.1 loopback address for localhost, the report suggests “127.0.53.53”. Because the result is so unusual, it’s likely to be flagged in logs and sysadmins who aren’t aware of a name collision issue are likely to search online for information about the address problems.