IT accidentally shut down Twitter’s t.co link shortener — Doh! Melbourne

Firm placed domain status on hold thanks to phishing complaint.

Yesterday Twitter’s t.co link shortener, which it wraps all outgoing links in, went down.

Was the culprit some self-proclaimed anonymous user? Or a DDoS?

Nope. Domain name registrar Melbourne IT has fessed up to causing the problem.

The firm, which is the registrar for t.co, admitted to CNET that one of its employees had temporarily taken the t.co domain name offline in response to a phishing complaint.

Yesterday in the process of actioning a phishing complaint, our policy team inadvertently placed the t.co domain on hold. The error was realized and rectified in approximately 40 minutes and t.co links again began working.

Whoops.

Hopefully the registrar will enact protections to prevent this from happening again.