As many of our readers may have noticed we went down for over an hour on Saturday, but in all my years of hosting this is the first time I’ve seen such a large outage caused by the domain registrar failing. Apparently, a number of Register.com’s partner name servers went down (although Register.com itself stayed up). This affected not only my accounts and web servers, but the partner’s main websites themselves. In other words, I couldn’t even visit the affected registrar’s website for support information or to open a ticket. Luckily, I found the company’s phone number buried in Google’s cache. Upon waiting 25 minutes on the phone, I finally spoke to an operator who informed me they were ‘aware of the problem’ and gave me to a few alternative links to use to access my account information, none of which worked.

I’m not sure what happened today but I can only imagine the number of websites that must have been affected if an entire group of registrar’s were offline.