Announcement Orbiter-Forum outage 2025-10-20

Lucy

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Hi folks,

As some of you will have noticed, we had an outage today that began somewhere around 06:30UTC and was formally resolved (by me) at 11:47UTC - though some people may experience issues still as things update.

This happened because the primary forum domain expired, and was redirecting to a parking page instead, and that happened because payment for the auto-renewal failed, but our registrar didn't send an email to alert us about that. So until this morning I was under the impression it had already renewed itself, but obviously it hadn't.

Further compounding the issue was the discovery that the email on the registrar account was also tied to the expired domain, so logging in to renew the thing was somewhat more complicated than it should've been. I've changed this now to avoid future issues like that. Also there's an AWS outage today that offered some background noise, but is otherwise unrelated to our incident.

As of right now the domain is good for three more years and I've done my best to convince the registrar that we really do need to know in advance if it's about to expire. If you're able to read this, then you're probably already getting the fixed domain resolved, but DNS being what it is some slower services might take longer to update, meaning they'll still get a broken board or the registrar's parking page until that updates. There's nothing I can do about that, unfortunately.
 
Thanks a lot, Xyon! I was worried there for a moment when I saw the domain was up for grabs. I assumed something along the described lines had happened, but there's always the danger that some opportunistic bot is going to take advantage of situations like this and then send you a ransom note...
 
Luckily it was resolved quickly and hopefully with not too many users awake to see what had happened. Thank you, you early birds!
I was up getting paged by work anyway, the internet has been unhappy today
 
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