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Nominet goes titsup after update to WHOIS tool

Coincidence? Outfit blames 'manual change to firewall setting'. Oops

Dot-UK registry Nominet temporarily went titsup on Thursday afternoon, much to the chagrin of its customers.

The not-for-profit, Oxford-based company coughed to a technical cockup that knocked some of its services offline for roughly 10 minutes, according to a flurry of complaints from registrars.

In a statement to The Register, a Nominet spokeswoman said:

“An error in a routine manual change to a firewall setting meant some of our services were temporarily unavailable. It was quickly fixed and everything is now working as normal.”

El Reg was told by a number of readers that they were unable to connect to the WHOIS or login pages on their registrar accounts.

Earlier today, Nominet said that it had updated its WHOIS tool to allow people to look up who owns short domain names, such as theregister.uk.

It's unclear if it was this update that had temporarily borked Nominet's systems.

The company said this morning that from 10 June UK businesses would be able to bid for shorter domain names. But the strategy has been repeatedly slammed by some Blighty registrars who have been claiming that Nominet's decision to bring second-level namespaces to life was purely motivated by its desire to raise cash.

Nominet has dismissed the accusations as nonsense. ®

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