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

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.

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.

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.

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.

I worked at a company that used MM and was involved in some of the domain work.

One of the really nice things about the service is they handle a lot of the general business continuity and security stuff that can really suck with traditional registrars. One of their main lines of work is they’ll work with you to resolve tld-squatting and typo-squatting by working directly with the registrars.

Even before an infinite number of vanity or scammy tlds started showing up it would be pretty difficult to find <your-growing-unicorn-startup>.biz to add to your portfolio of domains since the owner may just have forgotten to update their email in their registrar and were coasting on a 10 year registration. Maybe the squat was intentional and it’s now a 1:1 replica of your homepage with a phishing or other credit card scam going. Stuff like that really sucks to do yourself while handling your other responsibilities. MM was pretty successful at getting in touch with the owners in the first place and having the registrar yank and transfer in the latter case. YMMV of course.

Once a lot of tlds started showing up, and especially the porn related ones, they worked with the new registrars directly (like GoDaddy in the .us case here) in the “sunrise period” to make sure something like google.xxx doesn’t become a front page article about an actual porn site (in case you’re wondering, that one doesn’t go anywhere at all). Your other options are to work directly with each registrar or ICANN.

Oh, I didn't know they'd been around since '99. They called me on behalf of a Hollywood titan about one of my hobby domains, which happened to partially coincide at a dictionary word with one of their client's trademarks, some time around 2006. I don't recall that the approximate paralegal I spoke with actually identified the company; I never forgot the call, but hadn't thought to check who manages the studio's own domain. Go figure.

I found them surprisingly easy to deal with, and happy to have me on record that my toy domain had nothing to do with either their client or any money. I assumed as long as that remained the case I would never hear from them again, and for the decade or so longer I kept the domain, that was exactly how things went.