Network Solutions Experiencing Problems

If your domain is registered with Network Solutions, it’s likely that your website and email are currently down. Here’s what they posted on their Facebook page:

Some of you have posted about issues with your sites. Yesterday, some Network Solutions customer sites were compromised. We’re investigating the cause of this situation, but our immediate priority is restoring your sites as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, cybercrime is a persistent threat in today’s world. Despite our best efforts, no one is immune—including large providers like Network Solutions. We’re always working to create a more secure and reliable Internet environment for our customers.

Please refer to our blog for updates: http://my.web.com/12DyLxE. We appreciate your patience as we work to restore the affected sites.

Unfortunately, this means a fair number of the websites we host are currently unreachable, and there’s nothing we can do about it until Network Solutions fixes the problem on their end.

Hopefully the folks at Network Solutions figure out how to fix the problem soon so that everyone who uses them can get their websites and email back online. If your website is hosted with Banyan Theory, rest assured that it is still “up” and will become available again once Network Solutions resolves its DNS issues.

Update - Jul 17, 11:00am CDT

Network Solutions posted an update on Facebook:

Network Solutions is experiencing a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack that is impacting our customers as well as the Network Solutions site. Our technology team is working to mitigate the situation. Please check back for updates.

A DDoS is a type of attack where a hacker uses a large number of computers to flood a network with traffic, making the network unreachable. Unfortunately this means the problems are continuing for now.

Update - Jul 17, 1:50pm CDT

Network Solutions posted another update on Facebook:

The recent DDOS attack affecting some customers has now been mitigated. Customer websites should be resolving normally, and you should be able to readily access the Network Solutions site. If you continue to have issues, please contact our Customer Service team at 1-866-391-4357. Thanks to everyone for their patience as we resolved this issue.

As is evident by the comments left on their post, “mitigated” does not necessarily mean “resolved.” We are still seeing the effects of the outage. Hopefully this issue will be resolved sometime today. If you are a Network Solutions customer, feel free to call their customer service number above.

Update - Jul 18, 10:25am CDT

Yesterday afternoon, the Network Solutions DNS servers were responding intermittently – some requests received slow but correct responses, and some requests timed out. As of yesterday evening, the DNS servers were responding in an acceptable amount of time. This morning, it appears everything is back to normal.