South African Airways Blames Service Providers for Domain Expiration
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
SAA plays the blame game.
South African Airways (SAA) is blaming service providers for letting its domain name expire, causing a web site outtage. When the domain name expired, Network Solutions followed its standard practice of changing the DNS and sending visitors to a landing page.
In a note from SAA acting CEO Chris Smyth on the company’s web site, Smyth writes:
…This outage was not as a result of any oversight by SAA or its personnel, nor was this due to cyber attacks.
The problem was a direct result of service providers not meeting their obligations and SAA will be taking further action in this regard. Unfortunately SAA did not receive any pre-warning of the pending suspension but within hours of the problem being identified, the SAA IT personnel were able to address the problem ensuring minimal disruptions to our customers.
Smyth could be correct, if indeed the job of renewing its domain name was outsourced to, say, an IT firm, or if it had some sort of autorenewal contract with Network Solutions. That appears it may be the case. The contact email on FlySAA.com’s whois record was for ISP In The Net Technologies. It’s possible that ITNT dropped the ball. But it also makes domain name registrar Network Solutions look bad. So FlySAA should probably come out and say who made the mistake, rather than a general reference to a service provider.
Further Reading:
- Network Solutions to Launch Domain Name Auction Service?
- GoDaddy Launches Domain Buying Service
- Network Solutions introduces backorder keyword alert service
Tags: Expired Domains, Network Solutions, south african airways
There is no mention of the actual domain name in this article.
Yes, it was mentioned.
FlySAA.com
ICANN Registrar:NETWORK SOLUTIONS,
Created:1996-01-16
Expires:2014-01-17
Updated:2010-01-24
It is in privacy. Real Stupid !!
Why do they need privacy?
It is the fault of the IT company and the IT person at SAA.
I assume the website is one of the main business portals for the airline.
They should have known within an hour why the internet business stopped.
If the web company immediately renewed the domain, it goes live within seconds.
Maybe, they had difficulty getting in touch with the web company during off-hours.
JB, there’s a link to flysaa.com in 2nd paragraph of the article.
They just changed it to whois privacy after renewing.
Here’s what I find astonishing.
They just went through a potentially devastating experience in the world of domain renewals. Why on earth wouldn’t they just do a ten year renewal instead of four and be done with it?
Even with the premium that Netsol charges, it’s at most a measly couple hundred bucks.
@ SL – good question.
If it is the principal .com domain then there is no reason to register for less than 10 years. Even if you decide to change URL at one point you are not going to delete this domain anyway.
The same thing happened to Emirates a couple of years ago – maybe it’s an airline thing!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/31/emirates_domain_loss/
Hi, I work for Network Solutions. While we cannot comment on this issue as this is a customer of ours, we wanted to point to a post on our blog that may be useful to your readers http://blog.networksolutions.com/2010/over-communicating-can-be-a-good-thing/. These are useful tips no matter where you are registered and we also advice customers to setup autorenew.
Thanks,
Shashi
may be they expect phone calls for the 8$ renewal charges