Verisign meet its 100% SLA on .com Whois in June? — How did

Despite Whois problems in June, Verisign noted meeting its SLA for .com.

Each month Verisign and the other domain name registries submit notes to ICANN that include their uptime and performance numbers.

One of the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for Verisign’s .com contract is 100% uptime for Whois.

While reviewing recent registry notes this stretch I was surprised to see that Verisign noted it met its 100% SLA in June.

You may recall that Verisign had a hiccup in its Whois service in early June. When you searched for a domain on VerisignInc.com or via port 43, you received a response “No match for domain….” If you did the same domain search a second time you got the correct result.

This caused problems for anyone doing Whois lookups at the registry, not to mention some registrars that apparently use Whois for domain availability lookups (it’s uncommon for registrars to use Whois for this purpose).

I reached out to Verisign to understand why it noted 100% for Whois in June. The firm released this statement to Reglike:

Due to a configuration issue, some users querying Verisign’s public Whois service during the period June 1-June 2, 2013, may have intermittently received an incorrect response of No Match for the specified domain name. We corrected the issue on June 2 and have implemented additional monitoring to prevent this from occurring again.

We conducted a review of the issue and determined in the course of that review that while non-persistent but nevertheless inaccurate responses are undesirable, they did not constitute what common understanding would call service unavailability.