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

This smells like something happened with MarkMonitor, they accidently flagged zoom.us as brand spoofing and filed copyright complaint with GoDaddy who runs .us TLD. GoDaddy suspended the domain per the complaint.

It's possible, but MarkMonitor is Zoom's registrar, so there are plenty of other ways for a miscommunication between MarkMonitor and GoDaddy to cause this. Copyright complaints would be a more reasonable theory if MarkMonitor were mentioned and didn't have any other involvement.

I guess but if MarkMonitor accidently suspended it, it would be ClientHold but it was widely reported it was showing as ServerHold.

ServerHold is used with Registry (GoDaddy in this case) is disabling vs ClientHold is when registrar is pulling the plug (MarkMonitor)

So what would have MarkMonitor said to GoDaddy to cause them to ServerHold a domain?

If this is the case, then it seems to be a very clear-cut example as-to why we should reject these sort of automated "take downs". They can and are abused, including copyright violations on Github, YouTube, etc.

Since when did we accept, as a society, guilty until proven innocent? I recognize GoDaddy is not the government - but this is unacceptable. A human spending 3 seconds looking at the domain would understand it's a false-positive and should not be removed.

I don’t know if I’m misremembering, but I remember getting automated service emails about how Zoom.us will be a deprecated domain in favor of Zoom.com

When this outage happened, I assumed that they finally “made the switch” over but something went wrong.

Something I heard is that there was a Twitter account @zoom_us that was also deleted today.

Possibly MarkMoniter failed to renew the domain on time? Or there was a miscommunication around payment that led to the domain expiring?

There are status codes around that which would contain the word renew.

serverHold is generally only set by registry when they have some pending action which almost always legal related.

You can see a list of Status Codes here: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/epp-status-codes-2014-...

Renewal date is April 24, so unlikely. Even if it expired this year they would still have a week to renew.

> Since when did we accept, as a society, guilty until proven innocent?

At least since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

At one point on a trip to Hawaii I was detained in my room by hotel security for fifteen minutes after requesting a room key to replace the one I lost.

It turns out that they had typo’d 12 into the request type field instead of 1, and type 12 was “Covid lockdown protocol with security enforcement” leftover from 2020 and latent in their systems.

Depending on MarkMonitor have chosen to integrate with each other to handle the sort of trademark management that is MarkMonitor’s premium offering, either or both parties could have simply been off-by-one or typo’d in a transaction to cause this. It’s absolutely plausible to create a confusing nightmare outcome with a one-byte error. (And we’re having quite incredible cosmic rays today, so I hope they’re using ECC RAM!)