Why was Zoom knocked offline this week? There’s some finger-pointing

There’s a lot of finger-pointing going on between providers trying to explain this week’s two-hour outage of Zoom’s American service.

On its website, Zoom says its zoom.us domain wasn’t available on Wednesday because of a “communications error” between Zoom’s domain registrar, Markmonitor, and GoDaddy Registry, “which resulted in GoDaddy Registry mistakenly shutting down zoom.us domain.”

For its part, a spokesperson for GoDaddy said the problem was between Markmonitor and Zoom.

“The GoDaddy registry team notified an account person at Markmonitor of an inquiry, and Markmonitor failed to notify Zoom that we had made the contact about the inquiry,” Kristy Nicholas told Computerworld. “[It was] something that we noticed and wanted to bring their [Markmonitor’s] attention to.”

She couldn’t clarify whether the communication was by phone or email. But, she said, GoDaddy waited several days to get a reply from Zoom.

“MarkMonitor acknowledged our communication,” Nicholas said, “and so we presumed information had been relayed to Zoom. That presumption was incorrect, that information had not been relayed to Zoom.”

She wouldn’t detail what the issue was, only that “we noticed something, we made contact with Markmonitor and Markmonitor failed to pass that information on to Zoom.”

“GoDaddy followed its protocol for ‘if it makes contact and no action is taken’, and put the server block in place.”

 This sort of communications problem is “not uncommon” with many customers, she added..

Asked for comment, Markmonitor’s parent company, Newfold Digital, which owns diverse providers offering web hosting, web design, and online marketing, sent this statement: “Markmonitor did include the client on our communications with GoDaddy Registry. That said, we believe there are opportunities to improve co-ordination and communication between GoDaddy Registry and Markmonitor, and we are committed to making that happen.”

Computerworld emailed Zoom for a response to Nicholas’ statement that Markmonitor allegedly hadn’t passed its message to them. No answer was received by press time.

“I think the lesson GoDaddy learned,” said Nicholas, “particularly with a customer the size of Zoom, is if we made contact with a registrar and we don’t know if that contact has been passed along to their customer, then we would go directly to Zoom and make contact with them before we put a server block in place.

“We’ll definitely analyze this situation for opportunities to improve the process, to try to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

Communication issues are somewhat common but usually do not lead to service outages, said Johannes Ullrich, dean of research at the SANS Institute.

“Initially, the ‘whois’ system was intended to provide up-to-date contact information for technical and business contacts associated with a particular domain,” he said. “However, this system never worked well and was often flooded with spam, or the information was out of date. More recently, most domains use “privacy protected” whois records that no longer list actual contact information. In the case of Zoom, they elected to have Markmonitor manage any communications. Sadly, it looks like somewhere along the line, the ball was dropped, and the message from GoDaddy did not reach Zoom.”