To renew domain name, takes down online gaming service SOE.com — Sony forgets
Sony Online Entertainment goes down thanks to expired domain name.
Sony forgot to renew a key domain name, SonyOnline.net, which resulted in an outage on its popular Sony Online Entertainment game network found at SOE.com.
While SOE.com did not expire, its nameservers are set to SonyOnline.net. When the latter went down, so did SOE.com.
The Register surmised that it was probably a simple DNS issue that took the site down, rather than an expiration*.
Whois records prove differently.
SonyOnline.net expired on May 26, 2014. Network Solutions finally suspended the domain name this stretch, leading to the outage.
John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, apologized on twitter for the goof:
As for how Sony let the domain name registration lapse? Smedley tweeted “Notices sent to wrong email.”
The whois email on the domain name is [email protected].
* The Register has completely changed its story without mentioning the changes, which is why their story now reads that it was possibly an expiration issue.
