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Zoom outage caused by accidental 'shutting down' of the zoom.us domain

(status.zoom.us)
634 points RVRX | 1 comments | 17 Apr 25 00:55 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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RVRX ◴[17 Apr 25 00:55 UTC] No.43711958[source]▶
"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. "
replies(3): >>43711994 #>>43712118 #>>43712177 #
bo1024 ◴[17 Apr 25 01:28 UTC] No.43712177[source]▶
What does “shutting down” the domain even mean? Has to be a DNS thing, right?
replies(1): >>43712204 #
colechristensen ◴[17 Apr 25 01:33 UTC] No.43712204[source]▶
It's translated through several layers of people who don't know anything.

Their domain expired because at some level people made some pretty boneheaded mistakes.

Whomever their actual registrar actually was (GoDaddy it seems) stopped pointing the zoom.us nameserver record (NS) at AWS Route 53 which Zoom obviously uses.

    % dig +short zoom.us NS
    ns-387.awsdns-48.com.
    ns-1137.awsdns-14.org.
    ns-1772.awsdns-29.co.uk.
    ns-888.awsdns-47.net.
replies(2): >>43712262 #>>43712457 #
1. manquer ◴[17 Apr 25 01:42 UTC] No.43712262[source]▶
GoDaddy is the root registry for all .us ccTLD, MarkMonitor is the actual registar Zoom is working with. The issue seems to be more how GoDaddy assigned to the domain to MarkMonitor not something Zoom itself likely controls (such as NS records)

.us (and other many TLDs) uses EPP to communicate between registars (MarkMonitor here) and Registry (GoDaddy). It is probably an admin error rather than code[1], some manual approval or other human review workflow for high value domain and someone clicked/filled in the wrong value at GoDaddy or MarkMonitor would be my first guess.

[1] would have been observed and fixed long before today, transfers happen all the time after all