A slight omission… with very unpleasant consequences!

The American Regions Bank has been offline for a whole weekend. Why? No cyber-attack or technical failure to be found here, but a simple omission: the domain name was not timely renewed!

Accidents can happen. You just have to forget about your calendar on which you wrote down the expiration date of a domain name. Pretty much like Regions Bank’s Head of eBusiness did. He indeed forgot about the expiration date of the bank’s domain name, Regions.com, on Saturday 13 April. As a consequence, the domain, and thus also the website of the bank and its 1.700 branches, was down, and it stayed down until Monday, because only then could the domain be renewed. And to think that most customers take care of their banking business during weekends via Internet banking… And it was not until midweek that everything went back to normal worldwide and that all servers around the globe had the new address.

The worst part of it is that this incident could have been very easily avoided. A lot of registrars, including Combell, provide an automatic renewal option for domain names. In any case, this episode makes it clear that a registrar does more than just selling a domain and that a good registrar provides services that protect customers.

Read the article of origin here.