Failed to find name servers of example.com/IN

Wow. Made it through PHP, JS, bash, C++ before I had to ask a question. Apparently DNS is my Achilles heel. Here goes:

Failed to find name servers of example.com/IN.

I guess I'm lacking a basic understanding of DNS, though from what I gather you have a Primary NS where you edit a zone, any number of Secondary/Slave NS(s) which are basically host copies of the primary NS data, and Forwarders which then propagate this information about the Internet. Here are the contents of pertinent files:

named.conf.options:

forwarders{
    8.8.8.8;
    8.8.4.4;
};

named.conf.local:

acl slaves{
    xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;
    xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;
    xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;
    xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx;
};
acl internals{
    xxx.x.x.x/x
    xxx.x.x.x/xx
};
view "external"{
    match-clients{ any; };
    recursion no;   
    zone "example.com" {
        type master;
        file "/etc/bind/externals/db.example.com";
        allow-transfer { slaves; };
    };

    zone "x.x.xx.in-addr.arpa" {
        type master;
        file "/etc/bind/externals/db.xx";
    };
};
view "internal"{
    match-clients { internals; };
    recursion yes;
    zone "domain.tld" {
        type master;
        file "/etc/bind/internals/db.example.com";
    };
};

/externals/db.example.com

$TTL    600
example.com.    IN      SOA ns1.example.com. root.mail.example.com. (
            2014071303      ; Serial
            28800           ; Refresh
            7200            ; Retry
            604800          ; Expire
            600 )           ; Negative Cache TTL
;
example.com.                    IN  NS      ns1.example.com.
example.com.                    IN  NS      ns0.xname.org.
example.com.                    IN  NS      ns1.xname.org.
example.com.                    IN  NS      ns2.xname.org.
example.com.                    IN  MX      10  mail.example.com.
example.com.                    IN  A       xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
ns1.example.com.                IN  A       xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
mail.example.com.               IN  A       xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
subdomain.example.com.          IN  A       xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
www.example.com.                IN  CNAME   example.com.
www.subdomain.example.com.      IN  CNAME   subdomain.example.com.

-Registrar is set to use the XName nameservers and ns1.example.com.

-BIND restarts without any errors.

-Xname servers don't seem to have any information at all (maybe this is where the error lies?)