there’s a massive DDoS going on. DDoS Attack Against Dyn Managed DNS | Hacker News
yes , many domain registrar’s fail to resolve dns’s
That was 5 days ago. The problem affected a lot of internet infrastructure and was a news story but it has since been resolved. Are you still having trouble?
So who won the competition? There is no info on the site and the deadline was December 2. Very unprofesional 
I think all the devs gave up when Claymore released his miner.
Please see this other thread: Zcash Open Source Miner Winners? - #7 by solardiz