Zoom outage caused by accidental 'shutting down' of the zoom.us domain

zoom.com is an audio equipment manufacturer, which was there before zoom.us.

I guess that's what happens where they had to accept substandard domain, because they were unwilling to be creative about their name.

RegistrarSafe is a registrar spun up by Meta for precisely the purpose of guarding their own domains and isn't open to external customers.

> COM LAUDE

Someone had fun with that one.

That’s interesting, Apple used to use CSC, which is the “other” big corporate registrar, competitor to MarkMonitor.

Many of those also run their own gTLDs, too: .apple, .google, etc

GoDaddy is the rot of us domains, besides being rotten culturally as well

Wait really? I use a .us domain for personal stuff, that.. makes me want to reconsider.

I understood what you meant. I can understand why someone would want to clarify the terminology for those who don't know DNS well.

> GoDaddy runs the root dns for .us

.us is not the “root DNS” and your misidentification is muddying the waters.

.us is a TLD (Top-Level Domain) and more specifically, a ccTLD (cc = ‘Country Code’).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us

And the English Wikipedia says that its registrar is a subsidiary of GoDaddy named “Registry Services, LLC”.

The root DNS servers and registry are not run by GoDaddy or a subsidiary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server

They are operated by important entities. Not companies that release sexy commercials featuring Danica Patrick. I keep getting confused between GoDaddy and Carl’s, Jr.

There are countries whose ccTLD registrars are impeccably well-run and have been for decades, such as DENIC, the entity that oversees the .de ccTLD.

If you're based in Germany, I don't see a reason why you would want to avoid .de domains.

>>> This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.

That sounds like MarkMonitor is at least partly at fault here.

> Financially, a proper gTLD also can't raise prices unilaterally and weirdly, while if you pick a ccTLD, the country has free reign to arbitrarily change prices, delete your domain, take over your domain, etc etc.

Look into what’s happened with pricing on domains like .org and .info. They’re increasingly absurd, with the restrictions on price increases that once were there largely being removed, at the pushing of the sharks that bought the registrar. Why are these prices increasing well above inflation rate, when if anything the costs should go down over time? Why is .info now almost twice as expensive as .com?

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About 7 years ago

White hat hacking is fine.

I can guarantee you that miscommunication doesn't always require 2 people.

Source: Have been OH SO EVER PRECISCE AND EXACT in my communication with certain idiots, and they still screw it up. Several instances of "put this here carefully", only to return and find it all the way across the room upside-down and broken, come to mind.

Mark Monitor have correctly asked for `serverUpdateProhibited`, GoDaddy changed the code to `serverHold` instead.

I don't know why you're trying to spin it as Mark Monitor fault.

gTLDs are regulated by ICANN. As much as an organization can achieve to be a global multistakeholder group, at least the intention is to be global.

ICANN have a mostly hand-off approach to ccTDLs. The intention is that each country decide on their own regulations and management when it comes to their country code specific domains.

.nl is a very special case, and it is true that the Dutch government was not involved. .nl was the first country code TLD created outside of the US, when the domain system still was part of ARPANET and operated by the United States Department of Defense. .nl was then transferred to a foundation 10 years later, and that's where ownership now resides.

ccTLDs are somewhat of a mess. Many are created in universities, then transferred to a company or foundation. Others were sold to companies from the start. In some cases, government have sold their ccTLD to other countries.

.se for example was created in a Swedish university, and then later the government took possession of it (or the university gave it to them, can't really say). Now there are laws that explicitly defines how it should be used and governed, which then a non-profit foundation manage the implementation.

> gTLDs just subject you to an additional layer of incompetence, namely from the company running it.

ccTLDs also have to be run by some organization, which is often a private company. Maybe the country's oversight over this organization is better than ICANN's oversight over gTLD operators. Maybe it's not. Historically, the worst technical incidents have occurred at ccTLDs.

Presumably the idea is that fabricating a legal offense to shut down a ccTLD would be easier than it would be for regular TLDs.

I don't know if that's actually the case, I've heard some shady sites are using .su(Soviet Union) to avoid judicial actions.

It's the specific country being referenced, I think.

.us is more special, e.g. the owner should be a US entity, and must be public (Private Domain functionality is disabled for .us).

You can bet it wouldn't be actually discontinued, but you can bet when/if the UK gives away the island to Mauritius or whatever, they'll lease the rights to the highest bidder, and those people will be free to extort everyone with a valuable .io domain.

It's going to be interesting to see what they do. One of the core arguments when claiming the domain industry enjoys a competitive market is that switching costs are bearable and that switching TLDs is an option if registries increase prices too much.

So ICANN has a non-trivial choice to make. Either they maintain the position that switching costs are bearable and let .io disappear, or they admit that TLD switching is impossible and save .io, which will make it hard to argue the threat of (registrants) TLD switching keeps the industry competitive.

I don't think that's a real risk

This news to me, thanks for sharing.

same here with .ch! I trust Switzerland’s stability way more than I’d trust any business or country. I’m not actually sure if there’s any ccTLD more trustworthy. (yes I know that the TLD is ‘managed’ by a private company but still)

IIRC CIRA who is the delegated ccTLD manager of .ca is not a government entity (this is quite common in the ccTLD space actually, a lot of ccTLD are being managed by foundations or non-profits).

> .com itself is under jurisdiction of USA and operated by Verisign

Barely. The NTIA gave up all their leverage over .com in 2018. The only thing the US can do at this point is let the cooperative agreement auto-renew to limit price increases.

I wouldn't be surprised if the US withdrew from the agreement altogether at this point. Then .com would fall under the joint control of ICANN and Verisign.

What about .name?

> Literally every single TLD is administered by a government.

False. I’m not sure what you’re trying to assert, but governments don’t necessarily need to control/admin gTLDs, and as far as ccTLDs go, they’re under jurisdiction of the corresponding nation, usually, but they’re going to be “administered” by a tech company that holds a contract.

Anyway, “.com” does indeed answer to U.S. jurisdiction, despite being technically a gTLD, but registrations are not restricted to US-based entities. The main things that keep “.com” associated with the USA include the history/legacy of this quintessential “original” domain, as well as a general support from major countries that provide a “second-level” commercial domain, such as “.co.uk”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.com

I've used about 12 registrar's and dns providers and they are trash top to bottom - literally the worst and most difficult to do everything from basic setup to how they do things just plain weird compared to other hosting providers. They also aren't the cheapest option so other than brand recognition I don't get why people use them.

I bought my first domain from GoDaddy in high school. I remember them having the slowest dns portal in the world, and having to call support at least once about something they screwed up. Don't really remember the details, but I remember them causing problems and losing my business within a year. I've used at least 3 other registers since then and never had a single problem.

Here's something you all need to learn about site (or for that matter, tool) reliability:

Nobody gives a shit about how many good outcomes between incidents there are. They care about how many good hours happen between incidents, and they care how big the incidents are.

So if you make a tool that your coworkers use 5 times as much as the old process, that tool better make things at least 6x more stable or people will start talking about how the process fails 'all the time'.

"all the time", as near as I've been able to figure out, after people have been yelling at me, my team, or a team I'm privy to, is not "every day". No, all the time just means that it happens every couple of weeks and one time happened twice in one day, twice in consecutive days, or with two customers in rapid succession. Usually the day they're screaming about.

So if you're doing that thing every day all day long, where you used to do it rarely, but you made some progress on making it more frequent, nobody cares that it's every 100th run that fails, when it used to be every 10th. They just see the drama has gotten more frequent (and nowhere near as frequent as their narrative says, but you've already lost that argument)

SLA credits are an incentive for the service provider not making up for lost revenue from the outage.

If you have 100% SLA credit under 99% availability you can't aford to be less than 99% available and I know that your SLA means something to you, not just an aspirational bullet point.

From the linked article

> This block was the result of a communication error between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.

Markmonitor is used by some fairly large corps and web properties. It’ll be interesting to find out exactly what this miscommunication was.

They don't use Godaddy directly. Godaddy is the registry for .us. Zoom's registrar is MarkMonitor, who appear to be at fault for this outage.

I just remembered, they also can't do DKIM correctly. What good is a DNS provider that can't follow standards?

Companies as big as zoom are still perfectly capable of having a high level VIP decide "we're going to use GoDaddy because I saw their Superbowl ad".

I guess but if MarkMonitor accidently suspended it, it would be ClientHold but it was widely reported it was showing as ServerHold.

ServerHold is used with Registry (GoDaddy in this case) is disabling vs ClientHold is when registrar is pulling the plug (MarkMonitor)

So what would have MarkMonitor said to GoDaddy to cause them to ServerHold a domain?

> Since when did we accept, as a society, guilty until proven innocent?

At least since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

It's usually cached

That makes two reasons to avoid .us domains, the other being that you're not allowed to redact the WHOIS information on those.

wormed it is

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having a status page on the same domain seems... unfortunate. Other big players have it right, see githubstatus.com