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Oz companies fume as Enetica outage enters its second day

Hosting service's access to .au registry suspended

Australian web service firm Enetica has provoked consternation among customers frustrated about a prolonged outage now entering its second day.

Enetica's web hosting and domain/DNS service have been down with limited intermittent availability at best since Thursday.

The latest updates from Webcity, Enetica's parent firm, suggest techies have isolated the problem down to hardware failure. "We are currently implementing replacement equipment and in the process of deploying it," an update to Webcity's official support account on Twitter said on Friday. Support staff had earlier suggested a network outage was behind the problem in between apologising to customers and trying to dispel rumours of a security breach or DDoS attack.

"To our customers, Webcity is a functioning entity. The outage being experienced isn't a security breach & your data hasn't been compromised," support staff said.

Complaints from customers on social media and in a thread on Reddit are piling the pressure on Enetica.

"Our website & emails are completely down due to an issue with our domain provider ‪@WebcitySupport‬/‪#enetica‬," said one aggrieved user.

El Reg learned of the ongoing problems from an Australian reader.

"[There's] still no 'actual' information as to whether this is a massive DDoS attack, hardware failure, config issue etc but the initial report of the problem on website's twitter feed was 17:00 on 22nd March," our tipster told us.

Enetica hosts more than 23,000 websites, according to figures from Builtwith.com. Most of its customers are SMEs.

As a security precaution, auDA has taken the unusual step of suspending Enetica's access to the .au (Australian) registry.

To be clear, domain names registered with these companies are safe and will not be deleted whilst auDA is investigating, but any .au domain owners who have hosting agreements with organisations other than Enetica or their associated companies, should contact their hosting provider for assistance in obtaining a copy of their website, if you are concerned.

In an update, auDA offered to assist Enetica customers in getting their domain name password, a necessary prerequisite to transferring their domain name to another registrar.

Webcity's status page can be found here. ®

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