Administrator StereoNET Posted March 31, 2022 Administrator Posted March 31, 2022 (edited) Members, StereoNET experienced a major disruption and outage between the hours of approximately 7:00pm (AEST) March 31st, 2022 and some time in the early hours of April 1st, 2022. This was a result of our Registrar, TPP Wholesale, who is responsible for our domain registration, enforcing an ICANN policy of validation of contact information that is attached to a domain. After further investigation, no notification or email communication was ever received from TPP Wholesale relating to this matter, and the suspension of our domain not only blocked all access to the website, but it also entirely crippled our domain's email communication. TPP Wholesale have been asked to provide an explanation of why and how this happened, and we are also investigating alternative solutions to ensure that a third-party cannot have such control and potentially damaging ability when clearly there was a failure of process at their end. We are completely dissatisfied with TPP Wholesale over what has occurred, but also the difficulties experienced when trying to contact them to establish a). the reason the domain was suspended without prior warning, and b). the inability of their agents to respond and escalate the issue. We spoke with ICANN's Southeast Asia office late last night during the outage who advised that while they set the policy, it is up to the individual Registrar to implement it and they are solely responsible for the management and suspension of non-compliant domains. The ICANN policy has existed since 2014, however despite owning hundreds of domain names, we have never witnessed an ICANN verification nor a suspension for non-compliance. I am very sorry for the outage and the suspension of services that was not at all related to our hosting or technical services. It is embarrassing that a third-party can cripple such an organisation particularly when our initial investigation suggests it was caused through a fault in their own processes. I will be looking at ways to ensure this cannot happen again especially when we have invested so many resources into our hosting and network architecture, including failovers and redundancy at significant cost to avoid any downtime or outages. The good news is we are 100% operational once more. UPDATE: Some users will not be able to access StereoNET from some devices/ISPs until the DNS fully resolves once more for all ISPs. You may be able to access from your phone (non-WiFi) or via your PC, or vice-versa. Again, this is out of our control, but should be fully resolved by this evening. Edited April 1, 2022 by Marc Added update. 4 8
Guest Posted April 2, 2022 Posted April 2, 2022 Further updates or comments can be posted to Support Thread: 1
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