Back in July, domain name registrar giant Network Solutions experienced a significant Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. As I noted at the time, given that this was the second time in recent months they had been a target, and given they are such an inviting one because of the critical place they occupy in how the Internet functions, they seemed to be ill-prepared. This included a lack of preparation before the attack to assure rapid remediation, a lack of transparency during the attack in terms of keeping customers informed, and what appears to be a lack of ability to learn from their mistakes in anticipation of what had to be assumed would be continued testing by those with malicious intent.

Unfortunately, if you are not painfully aware already, it should come as no surprise that Network Solutions is once again experiencing problems, and as baseball sage Yogi Berra is famously quoted as saying, “It is , Déjà vu all over again!:

First let go to the Twitter feed of the company #netosl.

Let’s just say frustration abounds now that we appear to be roughly in hour three of the as-yet -unidentified problem. 

I think one tweet from the website I like when three are such problems, isitdownrightnow.com kind of says it all.

In fact, here is the latest from www.isitdownrightnow.com.

Worst of all, and this is what is so disturbing is the current view from www.networksolutions.com. To save you a visit and disappointment there is NOTHING there to indicate there is a problem. In fact, indulge yourself in a little exercise and go to Twitter #netsol again and click the other links for getting company info. It might compel you to send a few words.

It appears that things are getting back to normal for most if not all Network Solutions customers, and that is a good thing. What is not so good, and I am trying hard to give the company the benefit of the doubt given that they are dealing with this in real-time and may not have a complete view of why the outage occurred, is the continued lack of customer engagement. 

This is really getting repetitive and management should take a good hard look in the mirror and figure out if they would put up with such behavior from a “trusted” vendor. 


image via shutterstock

As King Henry V intones in his famous, “Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George!” speech in William Shakespeare's play Henry V, Act III (penned in 1598), “Once more into the breach!” 

We will let you know what’s known about the outage once there is clarity. Hopefully, that will be sooner rather than later.