Small businesses around the country expressed frustration this morning after an issue at domain name registrar Netregistry saw its users reporting email and website outages for hours.
Netregistry customers started complaining about website outages around 7:00am this morning, while others said that after testing their inboxes, it also appeared their email inboxes were not sending or receiving messages.
@netregistry have you guys gone into meltdown? None of your DNS services are working. https://t.co/vlgwkiOq1j
— Sam Lomax (@SamLomax) November 14, 2017
Get into office. See via emails and Slack that NetRegistry is having an issue but is resolved. Person bounds up to my desk – Hey, it seems that the internet is broken for our site.
<S I G H>
— Knight Raiosaurus (@dekrazee1) November 14, 2017
At 9:00am, the Netregistry incident status portal reported the incident was being investigated, and while “international and mobile access appears unaffected”, there were reports clients couldn’t access their own sites via non-mobile websites throughout Australia.
The concerns appeared resolved by mid-morning, but the company says it is still looking into some difficulties in accessing the websites.
[status] Investigating: Customers are reporting difficulty accessing the Netregistry website, console and their own… https://t.co/NVGto7CdxU
— netregistry (@netregistry) November 14, 2017
Council of Small Business Australia chief executive Peter Strong says his own Netregistry email inbox was affected this morning, and while outages are rare, he says these types of problems present a big challenge for small business owners.
“The thing is that you don’t actually know that you’re not receiving emails,” he says. This means some users can be left in the dark, not realising for some time that their services are out.
“But the thing is, whether we like it or not, these things are going to happen,” Strong says.
The current reliance on a range of digital systems to do business day-to-day means business owners have no choice but to cop an outage issue every now and then, he says.
While concerned customers were reporting their websites were back online by 10:30am, some took to Twitter to ask for updates considering Netregistry’s own website and incident portal was also offline this morning.
@netregistry updates please? Our website is still inaccessible. Can’t access your website too.
— Junilo Pagobo (@JuniloPagobo) November 14, 2017
Strong says the communication of these outages should be a top priority considering most systems are now digital.
“These things are going to happen — but maybe in the case of these, businesses can do something like broadcast an update by text,” he suggests.
SmartCompany has contacted Netregistry for comment.
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