One of the largest domain registrars in the world, Namecheap is facing a series of mysterious outages, and it's unclear why.
The company, which has more than 11 million registered users and 10 million domains, offers domain registration, hosting, private email services, and TLS/SSL certificates and has become one of the most recognizable brands in the industry.
User reports: I noticed the issue since 2:00 AM ET (7:00 AM UK time) after I was trying to view my website on my smartphone and couldn't. Maybe it was bad WiFi, I thought at first. Then I assumed it could be a case of scheduled maintenance.
Multiple mysterious holidays
When navigating to Namecheap's service status page, we see 4 advisories from August 30th.
1. Domain Registrations: The first notice of the service outage, dubbed “unscheduled maintenance,” was issued today at 3:41 a.m. ET regarding domain registrations. Users trying to register certain TLDs experienced issues. At 6:00 a.m. ET, the company announced in the same notice that it had fixed the issue, only to update the notice again at 7:05 a.m. due to persistent errors, which are still in effect.
“Failed orders will be refunded to the payment source or your Namecheap account balance so you can place a new order.”
2. ccTLD domain registrations: The second notice was released at 6:59 a.m. ET and concerned specific TLDs registrations (.me, .cc, and .tv).
At 7:30 a.m. ET the notification said: “The issue with the .cc and .tv domains has been resolved. We are still awaiting updates from our partner regarding the .me domains.”
3. Email and Namecheap: The service outage continued for the Namecheap.com domain itself and its email services at 8:27 a.m. ET. This alert was closed at 9:20 a.m. ET without further analysis and merged with a fourth alert below.
4. Shared hosting, email, VPS servers, WordPress infrastructure… basically nothing works
The final notice, issued at 8:29 AM ET, which remains in effect, says all of the company's services are experiencing issues. There is no estimated time frame for the issues to be resolved.
“We regret to inform you that namecheap.com, shared servers, Reseller, VPS, EasyWP and email services are experiencing temporary network connectivity issues. At this time, our technicians are working on the issue and are doing everything they can to minimize downtime,” the notification states.
The last update to the alert was at 9:27 a.m.
“The entire team is still working hard to resolve the issue as soon as possible. Unfortunately, there is currently no estimated resolution time. Thank you very much for your patience.”
Many users complain
Users are taking to Twitter to complain. User Isaac Garcia asked the company: “Your services are down, neither my domains nor the support team are working, is there an estimated resolution? According to your log, the issues were caused by an unscheduled maintenance.”
There have been more reports of users being unable to use Namecheap email and hosting services due to this unscheduled maintenance.
While the company is investigating the issue, the mention of “unscheduled maintenance” in the initial notification has created backlash among users.
