On Monday, a total of over 30 million Zoho customers spent two hours with no access to Zoho.com following a domain block. The Indian company Zoho is one of the world’s leading tech companies, which is included in Forbes’ 100 top companies list. Zoho’s website offers an extensive list of online office tools, including applications for word processing, note-taking and web conferencing, presentation and database creation, and many others.
The whole thing is rather absurd. Upon finding out about the domain block, Zoho representatives tried to resolve the problem via their customer service of TierraNet, their domain registrar. Except, they could not do it, for their calls and messages went unanswered. The company’s workers together with the CEO Sridhar Vembu had to appeal to their users via Twitter, apologizing for the unexpected takedown and asking their users to try and get a proper explanation from TierraNet. Such an original feedback method worked: soon enough, TierraNet representatives announced that the domain had been cut off due phishing emails being sent out as well as the registrant’s failure to properly combat phishing. This information was also posted on Twitter in response to one of the Zoho users’ angry appeals. The company, however, never got an answer from the registrar.
Sridhar Vembu called the TierraNet’s accusations ludicrous, stating that there were a total of three phishing complaints in the course of two months and that the company had promptly taken care of the two of them and had already been investigating the third one. “We serve 40 million users. 3 complaints in 2 months”, Vembu posted on Twitter sarcastically, implying that the phishing complaints were clearly groundless. Observers believe that TierraNet has if not exceeded its authority, then was at least a bit overzealous. Journalists from The Register website managed to prove that TierraNet was hard to contact: they tried getting through, but the phone number listed on the company’s website turned out to be disconnected. Later, they managed to get in touch via a second number and spoke with a company worker who refused to comment.
