Sites down in legal dispute

Tim Johnson. Photo / Supplied

Hundreds of websites could be caught in a legal dispute involving a former high-flying web developer who has moved to Canada.

Tim Johnson is the director of Safi Technologies, a web hosting and development company that went into liquidation on June 14 owing more than $600,000.

Last Friday, hundreds of websites, hosted by a company that was previously a subsidiary of Safi Technologies, went down.

It was the result of a legal dispute over ownership of the assets of JetHost which was launched by a Canadian company.

Website experts estimate that hundreds - possibly even thousands - of sites were affected by the outage.

Johnson's lawyer Jai Moss disputed this. He said there was an initial misunderstanding that resulted in sites going down last Friday but most of them were back up on Saturday.

About 15 to 20 sites were still affected, said Moss, but the liquidators had the ability to fix the situation.

Craig Melhuish, of liquidators HFK Accountancy, said they had not turned off the sites but could not comment further.

Fertility New Zealand's website has been down since then. Chief executive Michelle Collyer said it had been "incredibly damaging" to the national charity.

She said the website was used to deliver support to 5000 members.

"It feels like we are being held hostage over something we have no control over."

The website cost $15,000 to build and was stored on servers at JetHost. However, her organisation could not get access to it to arrange another company to host the site. She had engaged a lawyer after concerns that the dispute could extend to who owned the site and the membership database.

The Niuean Government was also believed to have been caught in the outage. Its site is listed on JetHost's list of clients and was down last week, citing maintenance.

Patrick Porter, from website design company Jade Creative, has helped Fertility NZ to get email back up and running.

"It is a murky situation. There was no discussion at all - the site just went down." Nobody knew who to talk to.

Howard Bell, from webhosting company EziWeb, had been helping their customers get back up and running. He said there could be as many as 2000 sites down.