back to article Emirates airline website plummets offline in A380 excitement

Dubai's government-owned airline, Emirates, forgot to renew its domain name this week, sending its website crashing offline on the same day it was trumpeting delivery of its first Airbus A380 superjumbo. Travellers keen to be among the first to book flights on the so-called "premium hotel in the sky" via Emirates.com were met …

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  1. TeeCee Gold badge
    Stop

    Network Solutions.

    You mean, rather than ask the customer if they wouldn't like to renew the domain, they dropped the customer's site and replaced it with a load of revenue-generating ads as soon as they could?

    Gosh I *am* surprised.

    Maybe Emirates should move to a provider who understands the other meaning of the phrase "servicing your customers".

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Iberia Airlines website went offline two weeks ago...

    Two weeks ago, I was trying to book tickets on Iberia Airlines website. On Friday we'd checked the prices online and "held" the tickets. On Saturday night when we went to finalize the tickets, the site was gone. No parked page, no DNS record at all. Tried from several connections to see if it was a local DNS snafu; tried from two US locations, one from Canada, one from Brazil, and one from the UK but none could find the site. We ended up calling in and finalized the tickets.

    Like in the story, first thought was that they liquidized and shut everything down.

    Site was reachable on Monday, and no reports of an outage on any of the news sites. Weird.

  3. pctechxp
    Paris Hilton

    thought they'd have

    a charge card on file to auto-renew or perhaps they pay in petrol or gold bullion?

    Wouldn't want to be the sysadmin that messed that up

    Reckon they'd be up for a few lashes.

    Paris because even she isn't so stupid that she would forget to renew her domain.

    Tip: Network Solutions have an auto renew option, just put a credit/charge card on file and worry no more.

  4. James Marten
    Flame

    Direct Debit

    "Quite how an organisation with the clout and financial backing of Emirates can't manage to set up a $10 direct debit we don't know."

    Easy to understand for anyone who has ever worked for a "big" company. Their purchasing systems are typically so inflexible that any payment which a mere mortal would make by DD or credit card, by just a few clicks over the interweb, has to be authorised against a quote or proforma invoice, and then an order placed by the purchasing department. Ostensibly this is "company policy" in order to manage spending and save the company money - even when it results in paying more. Or when the paperwork doesn't come though in time, leading to embarrassing situations like this.

    This is the 21st century... somebody please tell the accountants.

  5. John Taylor
    Stop

    Now the page can't displayed

    Well, things seem to be changung it's no longer a holdding page on their domain but an error saying the page can't be displayed and this is through Firefox which is most interesting and almost as though they haven't fixed their site.

  6. pctechxp

    another option

    they could always register it for 10 years

    They are owned by a government that are oil barons, I'm sure they can afford the fee.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    $10 Direct Debit?

    As a Web Systems administrator, I can tell you that it is NOT as simple as a $10 direct debit.

    Most global companies have multiple registrars (because each country registrar will levie higher fees for other countries) and then you have divisional in-fighting/crosscharging problems within the company - so usually its paid by invoice to a particular division.

    Oh to work for a company with centralised IT (and a spare $10 budget - hehe)

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    FFS

    Just pay for sundries like domain names personally and claim it back as expenses - JEEZE

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    please please please

    "This is the 21st century... somebody please tell the accountants."

    Please do this ! please !

  10. Dave Harris
    Dead Vulture

    Got hit by this last night

    I was looking at emirates flights back to Blighty, and while www.emirates.com waas ok, as soon as you hit 'next' (or whatever) the link to fly.emirates.com was still at the NetSol holding page.

    Whois said it was updated about five minutes previously, and I shut down the pc. By the time I'd thought again and fired up to get a screenshot,for Vulture Central, my ISP's DNS servers had updated themselves. Gah!!

    Vulture, cos something else wasn't flyng last night either.

  11. Darling Petunia

    Netsol

    Network Solutions sends account renewal 'reminders' ad nauseum

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Domain name registrations. Not quite that simple.

    As a hostmaster (yes we need more than one) of a large US MNC, I can tell you it is an uphill battle with country registrars who expect you to speak their mother tongue. Anyone speak Vietnamese or Bahasa Indonesia here? :D

    Still it isn't quite acceptable allowing your *main* domain name to do a disappearing act ;)

  13. Mr Larrington
    Happy

    Snk!

    This happened to a former employer and was doubly embarrassing as 99% of their business was conducted over teh Internets...

  14. Arnold Layne

    Re: Another Option

    "They are owned by a government that are oil barons, I'm sure they can afford the fee"

    Hell, they can afford Network Solutions

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    @TeeCee - the irony is that they have

    Emirates pays a company (not Network Solutions) to manage it's domain name portfolio to ensure that things like this do not happen.

    Like many large corporations, however, the IT department is so paranoid about anything going wrong with the main .com domain name that they refuse to let it be transferred across to that domain name management company.

    This sort of thing happens every day. The sooner people wake up and realise that Network Solutions is one of the worst places to hold domain names the better. Remember that this is the company that thought that pre-emptively registering domains that people were searching on at their site was an acceptable business practice.

    Oh, and that domain management company charges less than Network Solutions laughable $35 a year gTLD price so they could have saved some money too.

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