2day.com offline after admin error

By JUHA SAARINEN

An administrative error by 2day.com's United States registrar meant the local web hoster was effectively taken off the internet earlier today. The US registrar had wrongly caused the 2day.com zone to be removed from the .com hierarchy.

This in turn meant that none of the systems in the 2day.com domain would resolve in the domain name system leading to web sites hosted by 2day being unreachable and mail not being delivered. As well as hosting local web sites, the company is also a registrar in the .nz name space and an internet access provider.

Peter Mott, 2day.com's owner said he was not happy about the administrative mistake and that it demonstrated a major weakness in how the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the US organisation responsible for running the internet domain name system, manages the top-level zones.

Adding to Mott's woes, a recent decision by US company Verisign, which is currently managing .com and .net, to point all unregistered names in those zones to a system on their network is causing customer email to be lost. Verisign has set up a "mail rejector" that accepts connections from email servers, but then rejects messages.

Mott says that if Verisign had not done this, email to 2day.com domains would simply have been queued up and delayed by a few hours, instead of being returned to the sender, marked as "undeliverable".

Although fuming at the mistake, Mott said he was not considering legal action against the US registrar.

"We are concentrating our efforts to bring everything back online as soon as possible," he said, adding that in November, 2day.com will be able to take over responsibility for its own domain name.