Service Interruption Alert

service interruption alert

UPDATE 1-19-22

For the most part, the domain registrar Enom has recovered from the disastrous data migration that took millions of websites offline worldwide and interfered with email delivery for many systems. At Chroma Studios, we see that 99% of our customer websites and emails are back in operation and functioning normally. As of today, we are still getting sporadic calls about email and website issues.  While we are looking into these issues and doing what we can to mitigate the problems, we ask for understanding that this is not a service failure in our systems (which makes it a bit harder to help with), but a situation caused by a failure at a major internet service provider that had global consequences.

UPDATE 1-17-22 10:00AM

A troubled data migration at the domain registrar Enom has been disrupting internet services including websites and email all weekend, since about 9 am ET on Saturday. As of this morning, Enom is mostly back up and running, but there is still significant cleanup underway. Email: because of the nature of the service outage, some emails sent over the weekend may have been lost. Downtimes were spotty, but anyone who received a “bounce back” similar to this: “Delivery to the following recipients failed permanently:” that email did not go through and will not be retried.

While most services are coming back to normal operation, at Chroma we are working to identify any of our clients who are still having issues and working with them on specific problems related to the Enom service interruption. If your website is down, or you have a specific email problem that started over the weekend, contact us at info@chroma-marketing.com (our own email is back up and running) or call the office at 724-523-3001.

UPDATE 1-17-22 05:30AM

Due to the ongoing service interruption to websites and email caused by maintenance at Enom (the domain registrar), we may not able to receive emails at our usual email addresses. If you need to get in touch with us, please email us at chromastudioshelp@gmail.com  or call us at 724-523-3001.

Enom reports status as fully operational. But at this time we cannot reach support through their website or phone. They have not responded to our emails.

We believe that some of the services have been restored, but we know there are at least 50 of our customers without email. We apologize for that and as soon as we can access domain names, we’ll work to move the DNS away from Enom and get services restored.

UPDATE 1-16-22 10:50PM

Due to the ongoing service interruption to websites and email caused by maintenance at Enom (the domain registrar), we are currently not able to receive emails at our usual email addresses. If you need to get in touch with us, please email us at chromastudioshelp@gmail.com  or call us at 724-523-3001.

We’ve heard nothing new from Enom except: We have extended the maintenance period to allow our engineering team to continue to test & certify the correct operation of our platform, and also to remediate potential customer-facing issues in an expedited way.

I’m sorry that doesn’t tell us much and we can’t tell you much.  As of Sunday afternoon it appeared that about 50 of our customer’s websites and email was down. By Sunday night it appears to be worse. If you are using Smartermail, you can send mail out – but it’s unlikely you will receive mail.

Enom has provided no support and as of this time cannot login to access your domain name. We’ve been checking things and working on this all weekend.

The issue is with DNS.  DNS are the “pointers” to your website and email. If the pointers aren’t working no one can find your website or send an email.  These are highly redundant systems and we have no idea how the entire system failed. We’ve never seen anything like it in our 22 year history. This is affecting websites nation-wide and even some Google Workspace services.

We’ll keep you posted as we learn more.

1-16-22

The Domain Name Registration Company Enom has been experiencing technical issues since about 9:00 am on Saturday and the situation is ongoing.

Enom handles Domain Names (many millions of them), and since Domain Names control websites and email among other services, you may be experiencing a service outage with regard to one, both, and/or other specialty services.

The outage is spotty. We have identified a number of Chroma Studios customers who are affected, but not all. Even where a service is working, the service may be partially broken. For example, we have email customers able to receive email from gmail.com, but not from Comcast.net. Or the www address of a website may work, but not the http:// version of the same address.

Keep in mind that if your services are affected, that is only one side of the problem. The person trying to email you may be in the same boat, and their emails may not be going anywhere, etc.

the nature of the problem

Enom was performing a Data Center Migration, originally scheduled to take place between 9 am ET and 9 pm ET on Saturday. According to their own service bulletin, DNS (websites and email) would be unaffected and remain operational.

Shortly into the migration, it became clear that this was not going to be the case. Enom began to receive reports that their nameservers were failing to resolve (basically why people are having troubles).

Since then, Enom has extended their maintenance service window three times. It is now scheduled to be active until at least 3pm , ET on Sunday. We would not be surprised if it is extended beyond that. You can monitor Enom’s progress at https://enomstatus.com/

will all problems be resolved once the enom alert clears?

Based on our understanding of Domain Names, DNS, and email services, we believe some problems could continue well into the week ahead.  This is because of the complexity of the many Internet related systems that must work together to make such services appear seamless in operation. It may take these systems some time to resync.

Secondly, even if only 1% of the services involved in this migration continue to have issues into the week ahead, that number could be tens or hundreds of thousands. Some of those are sure to be among Chroma Customers.

After Enom is up and running and has presented more information about the problem, and their help desk becomes available (though it may be overwhelmed at first), we at Chroma will work to identify remaining issues and try to resolve them as efficiently as we can.

looking ahead

If you are having issues, please check again after Enom (https://enomstatus.com/) declares the main issues resolved. Until then there is no information we have or action we can take that will affect anything with regard to this issue.