One of the largest tech company, Zoho.com disappeared from the internet after being pulled offline on Monday morning.
The company’s CEO Sridhar Vembu tweeted “Our domain is blocked by our registrar and they tell us to contact legal. We are unable to reach their senior executive” He further asked his followers to help him reach TierraNet, their domain registrar.
Zoho was suspended after repeated contact requesting them to take action against phishing emails. They didn’t, so we had to suspend them – Representative, Tierra.net
One of the customers who contacted Tierra posted their chat online in which they claimed that they received 3 complaints in the past 2 months so they had to take this action.
There were a total of 3 complaints in 2 months and we took action on 2 of them immediately and one is pending investigation. We serve 40 million users. 3 complaints in 2 months.
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) September 24, 2018
Zoho claims to have more than 40 Million users currently which include some of the big names like Netflix, Air Canada and the LA Times. All these customers were unable to access their database and emails. Frustrated by this they flooded Zoho’s social media with angry posts.
To which Zoho took full responsibility and replied “We are working hard to identify why the domain was taken down by the registrar in the first place. Once we do that, we will take alternative steps so this never happens. We apologize sincerely but this issue is well beyond our control and our domain was taken down with no notice!”
Yes a detailed explanation is coming, as we dig our way out of this. We are working to ensure that everyone is able to access https://t.co/o2TlVFrtjB and ensuring that this does not repeat ever again. We apologize.
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) September 24, 2018
Later in the day, Zoho was back up and running but the damage was done.
Customers were redirected to a blank page, changing the domain DNS records helped some people but a lot of them were still unable to access their database.
Now Zoho is asking their users to try modifying their DNS settings to 8.8.8.8 (Google DNS) or 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare DNS), servers that have already been updated.
For customers who're still experiencing issues, please try modifying your DNS settings to 8.8.8.8 (Google DNS) or 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare DNS). This should resolve these issues.
For instructions on modifying your DNS settings, please refer to this: https://t.co/3oiGRTFJEB
— Zoho (@zoho) September 24, 2018
According to recent update from Zoho, they have migrated to a new registrar (Cloudflare) already. There has been no official comment from Tierra.
We’ll keep you posted once we get any update!
Even though we have the assurance from Zoho that nothing like this will ever happen again but with all the threats and vulnerabilities around the web a big company like Zoho should always keep backup plans and redundant system for worst case scenario.
