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634 points RVRX | 10 comments | | HN request time: 0.422s | source | bottom
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film42 ◴[] No.43712374[source]
Zoom CEO: Hi, we'd like an SLA credit for the global outage you caused our company.

GoDaddy: I am so sorry about that. I can offer you a one-time coupon for $10 off your next purchase or renewal. Would you like me to apply this to your account?

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Most companies just hope an apologetic zoom call is enough to retain your business, and most of the time it works. Not enough has been written about the asymmetry of your SLA credits to your revenue impact for a given vendor outage and how that should guide your build vs buy decision framework.

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Geezus_42 ◴[] No.43712530[source]
Why would you use godaddy for a service as large as Zoom? They have been garbage for years. The way they locked out their ACME api for anyone but top tear clients sealed the deal for me. I would never trust them.
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0x0000000 ◴[] No.43712620[source]
They don't use Godaddy directly. Godaddy is the registry for .us. Zoom's registrar is MarkMonitor, who appear to be at fault for this outage.
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sgarland ◴[] No.43712691[source]
Never heard of MarkMonitor before. Not a great start.

I had Google Domains for years, until they abruptly and bizarrely abandoned it, then I left for Porkbun. Never had a problem with either of them. I get yearly auto-renewal notices. Everything works, and it’s very boring, which is precisely what I want from a registrar.

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dewey ◴[] No.43712719[source]
That’s because you are maybe not in the market for MarkMonitor. If you check the whois for any global brands chances are they are held by MarkMonitor. Just like you don’t use EY as your tax advisor.
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1. sgarland ◴[] No.43712752[source]
Genuinely, I don’t understand how anything other than uptime matters for a domain registrar.

What services are they offering that makes them attractive to corporations?

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2. reilly3000 ◴[] No.43712772[source]
They generally do full service brand monitoring to protect IP and maintain continuity. You would outsource monitoring for trademark infringement to them, and be certain that domain renewals are done perfectly for a portfolio of high value domains.
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3. lolinder ◴[] No.43712797[source]
Which is why this outage is so weird: the entire point of paying MarkMonitor is ensuring that absolutely nothing goes wrong with a very fraught process, and they seem to have just taken down one of the biggest brands they support.
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4. slyall ◴[] No.43712830[source]
The are supposed to also filter things like complaints. If somebody complains I'm sending spam and I only pay $20/year then my registrar might lock my domain and then I have to work to get it back online.

Mark Monitor will apply a lot more filtering to complaints.

Ironically this is allegedly what happened in this case, a complaint about the domain got it taken offline.

5. throwanem ◴[] No.43712848{3}[source]
Precisely. You pay a company like this the nosebleed-inducing fees they charge so that this exact event never happens. That assurance, and not the mechanics of domain registration or canned web searches or whatever else, is their product.

It's like, as I'm sure I'm paraphrasing from something I read God alone knows how many years ago, if your publicist lets you walk into a press event with a giant blob of snot hanging out of your nose. There surely is a reason why that error occurred, and it probably is at least a pretty good reason. But no one is very surprised to see the intro invite from your new publicist.

It isn't a relationship you blow up on a whim, but Zoom that can't route call traffic is Zoom that's not generating revenue, and while the reputational impact is negligible if it happens once, it had really better happen only once. Zoom is the incumbent; no one remembers they were revolutionary once, now everyone only notices the parts they don't like. (Being a skilled but politically naïve sysadmin is much the same.)

Basically, this is why Ma Bell - which had about the only stronger possible "uptime" expectation, in that no one uses Zoom for 911 - was so uptight you couldn't even plug in a modem until about five minutes before divestiture, and specified everything down to the number of turns in the splices their technicians made. There was a fad among programmers, when I was a child, to consider such practices stodgy.

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6. BrandoElFollito ◴[] No.43713415[source]
Why would uptime matter that much for a registrar?

(As opposed to a DNS server, including root servers - and even then DNS has provisions for downtime, not to mention redundancy in configurations)

7. toast0 ◴[] No.43713638[source]
Like others said, uptime for a registrar barely matters. For an important domain, I don't want anything to change, and if the registrar is down, nothing will change, so that's good.

What MarkMonitor can provide is things like facilitating RegistryLock, which makes it even harder for changes to be made. And account reps that know what's going on. I hate working with account reps, but if they're knowledgable and easy to work with, it's ok.

They do some trademark monitoring (thus the name), if you want to get your own related app taken down from Google Play :p (I'm not bitter, it was amusing). And presence services if you need to hold a domain in a weird location that wants a presence, they can probably arrange it, which is handy at times.

I'd love to know more details on this incident, MarkMonitor had a bulletproof reputation as a registrar that won't fuck up. Godaddy doesn't, but then I didn't realize they had taken over the contract for .us

8. kryptiskt ◴[] No.43714028[source]
They can offer humans in the loop, and those cost a lot. Like, a real live human will contact you and ask if you really want to transfer microsoft.com to Shady Shell Company (Bermuda) Ltd. Porkbun's pricing model is less attractive when your domains are worth billions to you.
9. macintux ◴[] No.43718140{4}[source]
Obligatory Indiana Bell building rotation link.

https://www.archdaily.com/973183/the-building-that-moved-how...

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10. throwanem ◴[] No.43718229{5}[source]
I did not know that story!

What a paragon of engineering.