On Monday, Zoho’s business entire suite was taken offline after TierraNet, their domain registrar, overstepped its attributes and took Zoho.com offline after a series of banale phishing complaints.
Zoho counts Columbia University, Netflix, Citrix, Air Canada and the Los Angeles Times as customers. The downtime resulted in nearly 30 million Zoho users being unable to access Zoho’s suite for their operations including: email, documents and files, and other business-critical software during the day.
Sridhar Vembu, Zoho CEO, said in an email to TechCrunch that TierraNet “took our domain down without any notice to us” after receiving complaints about phishing emails from Zoho-hosted email accounts.
“They kept pointing us back to their legal, even when I tried to call their senior management,”
— Sridhar Vembu, Zoho CEO
This is no surprise as most email providers, large and small, are abused on a daily basis. But in all cases, these issues are left to abuse departments of email providers. Domain registrars are rarely called upon to intervene, and usually in the case of domains associated with smaller sites, not for Forbes 100 companies.
After the issue was resolved with TierraNet, many users still experienced connectivity issues due to slow nature of domain name resolving. Zoho recommended their users to use Google’s DNS Server to bypass this issue.
For customers who’re still experiencing issues, please try modifying your DNS settings to 8.8.8.8 (Google DNS) or 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare DNS). This should resolve these issues.
For instructions on modifying your DNS settings, please refer to this: https://t.co/3oiGRTFJEB
— Zoho (@zoho) September 24, 2018
