The day before yesterday numerous fans of online gaming realized they couldn’t access Sony Online Entertainment network. Initially it was assumed that the problems were caused by a technical malfunction of one of the DNS-servers. However, the genuine cause turned out to be way more prosaic. As it turned out, Sony had simply forgotten to renew registration of one of its key domains - SonyOnline.net.
It expired on May 26, but it’s registrar Network Solutions hoped till the last moment that Sony would fix the problem. They sent various letters to Sony reminding them that the registration should be renewed. However, it hadn’t been done and this week Network Solutions temporarily blocked SonyOnline.net domain. (To clarify, gaming network Sony Online Entertainment uses its own domain SOE.com, its registration hasn’t expired yet, but its nameservers are set to SonyOnline.net, so blocking of the later inevitable caused blocking of SOE.com.)
John Smedley, President of Sony Online Entertainment, apologized to all gamers on Twitter. He called the incident “embarrassing and preventable” and promised that the problem would be taken care of in 48 hours. Smedley explained that it all happened because notifications about the necessity to renew registration were sent to an email address that was no longer used.
Marina Nikerova, senior deputy director of Technical Center of Internet, drew attention to the fact that casual attitude towards domain names is quite common: “Domain names due to their comparatively low price are often considered something that doesn’t require much attention. Meanwhile, domain name is the first thing that visitor or user of the website encounters. Gaming services, mobile applications function using DNS system, therefore support of the pool of names, that serves a given Internet-business requires careful treatment».
