InterNIC Weekend Outage?

Thu Mar 4 19:37:36 UTC 1999

omni at dynmc.NET (Gregory A. Carter) writes:
>Have a guy that had this emailed from his ISP.  If this is in fact true we
>all could have some very unhappy customers in the comming days.  I haven't

I've been hearing similar things since Monday.  I didn't see any
news reporting, or operational bulletins from NSI early in the week.
So I asked some individuals at NSI and other places.  Without
independently verifying the information, and without getting an
"official" spokesperson's story, my understanding of what happened is

   - Severe storms in Herndon, VA on Sunday
   - Power outage(s) in the area of NSI's data/telecommunications center
   - One of the UPS busses failed
   - Telephone switch and some equipment lost power and rebooted
       Exactly how everything is connected internally may explain
       why somethings worked and somethings didn't work
   - The claim is no data was lost or corrupted due to the power problems
But
   - At the beginning of the month (Monday) NSI was also changing how
     they cleared out, what they thought were people with large
     numbers of unpaid domains.  Some people say the domain payments
     weren't due until later in the month, NSI says they can demand
     immediate payment from people with "lots" of unpaid domains.
     Since in the past NSI has had a poor track record of doing mass
     deletes of domains, saying they were unpaid, and then later
     evidence appearing they were paid or never billed correctly, some
     scepticism may be warranted.

There may be multiple incidents.  The fact the power problems came
at the same time NSI was changing how they cleared out domains at
the beginning of the month is so far just a coincidence.
-- 
Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO
  Affiliation given for identification not representation