Afternic

For the last couple of weeks, I had difficulty accessing the Afternic website. I posted a note on Twitter asking if others had the same issue, and I was relieved to learn that a few others were also unable to access the website because it seemed like an isolated issue. When I checked Afternic’s status on Down For Everyone Or Just Me, I saw that the site was operating. I was also able to access Afternic when I was on my iPhone.

Afternic and GoDaddy engineers were made aware of the issue, and the outage was resolved late last week. I asked what caused the outage, and Bob Mountain, Chief Revenue Officer at Afternic shared the following information with me:

“In late August, we were made aware that a small subset of customers were unable to access Afternic.com. These customers were unable to access the website, but were still able to completely manage their accounts through our customer services team. We have investigated the issue and determined it was a firewall setting. We have fixed the issue. If someone is still experiencing issues, we recommend they contact us at service@afternic.com.”

During the outage, I relied on Afternic’s support team to add and remove domain names as well as update pricing. Since most of Afternic’s sales are done via GoDaddy (at least in my experience), I presume the outage did not impact sales. In fact, I