Registrar and .us registry for downtime — Zoom blames

“Communication error” between registrar and registry results in major outage.

Zoom has seemingly blamed GoDaddy Registry, which manages the .us namespace, for an outage yesterday that impacted its zoom.us domain.

Its official incident note states:

On April 16, between 2:25 P.M. ET and 4:12 P.M. ET, the domain zoom.us was not available due to a server block by GoDaddy Registry. 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.

Zoom, Markmonitor and GoDaddy worked quickly to identify and remove the block, which restored service to the domain zoom.us. There was no product, security, network failure or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack at Zoom during the outage. GoDaddy and Markmonitor are working together to prevent this from happening again.

MarkMonitor is a brand protection registrar owned by Newfold Digital.

Domain registrars typically send automated requests to registrars. That stated, GoDaddy Registry offers Registry Lock for .us domain names, which requires manual confirmation between the registry and registrar.  Zoom may use this service, given the importance of the zoom.us domain name.

While the incident note seems to blame GoDaddy Registry, it wouldn’t have made a change without MarkMonitor making an request.