NameJet

During  the past couple of weeks, NameJet has been experiencing some technical problems, which led to unexpected downtime for the platform. Unfortunately, this caused some issues for people trying to place backorders and bids while the website was down.

This morning, the company emailed customers to announce planned downtime “to improve the performance of the NameJet platform.” The downtime will happen tomorrow, and it is scheduled to be completed a couple of hours prior to the daily backorder deadline. The company stated that if the maintanence takes longer than expected, they will send updates to customers.

It might be a good idea to place backorders ahead of time tomorrow just in case (or if you typically place them during the hours the website will be inoperable). The

Rare 2 letter domain SX ·COM in public auction. Last chance! $550,000+ #domains http://t.co/zsx1BEJHd3 pic.twitter.com/FSVojjpHUD

— NameJet (@namejet) July 9, 2015

I wrote about the NameJet auction for SX.com when the pre-bidding was at $20,000. According to a tweet from NameJet this morning, SX.com has hit its reserve price, and this two letter .com domain name will sell to the highest bidder later on today.

At the time of publication, the current high bid for SX.com is

NameJet suffered a significant amount of downtime yesterday. Jonathan Tenenbaum, General Manager of NameJet, shared an update about the outage and provided information about auctions that were missed:

“As of this morning, the NameJet website is online and fully operational. Please note that the recent technical difficulties were NOT caused by a hack or breach of any kind, but instead were related to a hardware issue. But regardless of the cause, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience ordisruption.

And in order to reduce the impact to the auctions, the following steps are being taken: (i) all auctions that were scheduled to close on Monday, July 6th have been pushed 24 hours, to July 7th; and (ii) for domains with the Pre-Release period ending either Sunday, July 5th or Monday, July 6th, those auctions will be set to “public” to allow those who could not place backorders to still participate. For a few of the domains originally in this group, we were able to extend the Pre-Release period to provide additional time for our customers to place backorders. Please look to the NameJet website to see what the status is for domains that you are targeting. And please keep in mind that during the public auctions all bids entered during the active auction will be for the next highest amount, so you cannot simply place a backorder as a way to “watch” the auction.

Thank you everyone for your patience and understanding and good luck in the auctions!”

If you have any questions about the outage, backorders, or auctions, you should contact Jonathan directly. You are also welcome to post your questions here if you would prefer to get a public response.

If you have visited NameJet this afternoon to place a bid or backorder a domain name, you’ve likely been redirected to a maintenance message on the website. Visiting NameJet.com  redirects you to Maintenance.NameJet.com with the following message showing:

We’re sorry, but we were unable to process the redirection request for the site you are attempting to access.

If you feel that you are receiving this message in error, please check the URL and try your request again.

I reached out to the management team at NameJet and was given an update from Jonathan Tenenbaum, General Manager at NameJet:

Due to some unforeseen technical issues, all NameJet auctions scheduled to close today (7/6) are being pushed out 24 hours (to 7/7). We will provide additional information as it becomes available and thank everyone for their patience and understanding. We are truly sorry for any inconvenience caused by these issues.

I was told the company will be updating customers in an email, and they will also be providing an update on the company’s Twitter feed.

Once I hear back with another update from the company, I will publish it here. Hopefully the issue will be resolved shortly.

11:15pm Update:
Here’s an update from NameJet’s Jonathan Tenenbaum:

“Unfortunately, as of this evening we are still dealing with technical issues. We have a great team working very hard get our website up and running and we are hoping to have the site back online shortly. As we stated earlier, all auctions that were scheduled to close today (7/6) have been pushed 24 hours – to 7/7. For domains with the Pre-Release period ending this evening, some of those domains will have the Pre-Release period extended 24 hours. Due to system limitations, the Pre-Release period cannot be extended for all domains, so those auctions will be set to “public” to allow those who could not place backorders to still participate. Thank you to all of our customers for your patience and understanding. We should have more information available tomorrow morning and we will share it as soon as possible.”