Why could Public Hosted Zone DNS records fail lookup?

Question

I have a Route53 public hosted zone containing the normal CNAME/A/etc records for using an S3 bucket to host a static website, yet "nslookup" on these records fails, and I don't know why. The domain remains unavailable on the inte.net, presumably because these DNS records fail lookup.

One of the AWS troubleshooting guides recommends using "nslookup" to check the hosted zone records, but it doesn't say what to do if it does fail.

My question specifically is: since "nslookup -type=A my_domain" fails for one particular hosted zone, what can I try to resolve it? I can see the records there in the hosted zone.

(I have another hosted zone which works fine - it uses a S3 bucket to host a static website. The website is publicly available and "nslookup" on the hosted zone records succeeds. I've tried to make the troublesome hosted zone equivalent to the working one, but to no avail.)

I already:

• confirmed the hosted zone is public.
• confirmed the NS records of the hosted zone match those of the registered domain
• tried ipconfig /flushdns

The NS and SOA records do exist, they were auto-created by AWS (are clipped from the screenshot).

Edit: The response from nslookup is:

Server: cache1.service.virginmedia.net Address: 194.XXX.X.100

*** cache1.service.virginmedia.net can't find bXXXXXXXXXXe.com: Server failed

Answer 1

Credit to kdgregory who got to the bottom of it, "nslookup" was not working because of some config with my ISP/router, the relevant comments are repeated here:

"This appears to be a problem with cache1.service.virginmedia.net. I tried looking up my personal website using it, waited for what seemed like 30 seconds or more, and got the message "connection timed out; no servers could be reached". My next guess is that Virgin Media is your ISP, and your router is configured to use their nameserver by default"

"You can try another nameserver, such as Google or CloudFlare, to verify that your hosted zone is set up correctly. Run nslookup without any command-line arguments, enter server 8.8.8.8 as the first interactive command (this is Google's service), then enter your hostname as the second command. Ctrl-D or Ctrl-C to exit"