On July 1, 2004 the .org TLD stopped working.
The outage was noticed far and wide - names in .org simply stopped working. The perception of the outage varied from place to place, suggesting that the problem was related to, exacerbated by, or partially masked by the use of anycast technology by PIR's subcontractor.
I noted this event in my blog entry "Did ICANN Even Notice .Org's Problems?"
It has taken several months for PIR, the registry operator for .org, to publish its month report for the period.
The June report from PIR claims that no name resolution outages that month. PIR's July report indicates 60 minutes of "unplanned" outage.
Was that July outage of 60 minutes the same failure as the one that occurred on July 1? We can not tell because the PIR July report says absolutely nothing about the date of the outage, its cause, or what corrective measures were taken to ensure that it does not recur.
PIR's subcontractor is associated with a bid for the .net redelegation currently underway in ICANN. Failures, even unplanned ones, are a fact of life - bad things happen to everyone. An unplanned outage - that I can forgive. However an apparent unwillingness to learn from failure or to make the lessons visible to other registry operators - that is not forgivable. Unless the July .org outage is clearly explained (along with a satisfactory statement of why a timely report was not made) the operator involved should be eliminated from contention for .net.
Posted by karl at January 31, 2005 7:57 AM