DomainTools Whois “Service Unavailable” (Updated)

If you use DomainTools as much as I do, you have probably noticed that Whois searches on the platform return a “Service Unavailable” message. This service outage is impacting current Whois lookups as well as Historical Whois lookups.

DomainTools responded to an inquiry about the outage a little while ago via Twitter, telling attorney John Berryhill, “We are working around the clock with the provider to fix!” Several hours ago, the company tweeted that “ETA is a few hours out,” and it seems that the issue is still being addressed.

The company did share a tip to access Whois records, although I presume this doesn’t help with Historical Whois records:

Although there are plenty of alternatives for standard Whois lookups in a pinch, DomainTools is my primary source for Historical domain name lookups and other important domain name research for buying and selling domain names. This has put a temporary halt on some of my domain inquiries that required a historical Whois search. I am sure others are in the same position as me.

Hopefully the outage will be fixed very soon. When a reliable service like DomainTools sees downtime, it reminds me about how important it is and how reliant I am upon it. I will try to provide an update when I see that DomainTools is up and running again.

Update: Service appears to have been restored.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

8 COMMENTS

  1. @Elliot, do you mind sharing how historical domain name lookups and research benefit in buying and selling domain names?

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