IBM has released a statement on a September incident that resulted in its cloud services being down over for almost an entire day, in particular, services related to load balancers between servers and reverse DNS lookup. It turns out that IBM or its outsourced registrar simply forgot to renew or failed to agree to renew, leaving the company’s domain names − global-datacenter.com, global-datacenter.net and network-layer.net − to expire, The Register reports.
This is not the only case like this. For example, in June, Samsung was reported to have let its ssuggest.com domain expire. It was used to manage its S Suggest app, which served as a recommendation service and came pre-installed on Samsung smartphones before 2014. As a result, the domain could have been registered by anyone, which was a potential threat to the owners of older Samsung smartphones.
IBM representatives have assured users that there would be no such mistake in the future. Specifically, they have confirmed that their domain names are set to auto-renew.
