Regions Bank Fails to Renew Domain Name – Web Site Goes Down

Regions Bank, an FDIC insured bank with 1,700 branches and 2,400 ATMs across a 16-state network in the South, Midwest, and Texas, failed to renew their domain name. As a result, their web site is down.

According to an article in the Tampa Bay Times, a spokesman for Regions Bank said, “We are experiencing an intermittent network issue that is impacting some customers’ ability to access our web site…We are working to resolve this issue quickly and apologize to our customers.”

Uh, um, it’s not an intermittent network issue. One of your employees didn’t do their job–they didn’t renew the regions.com domain name. As a result, the web site went into “Pending Delete” status:

If you fail to renew your domain name by the specified date, the registrar, Network Solutions in this case, will put up a landing page with a bunch of PPC (Pay Per Click) ads.

My recommendation here: renew your domain name for several years if you care about it. In fact, I recommend that you renew it for at least 10 years (if it’s a business).

Hat Tip goes out to Peter for bringing this to my attention.

Thedomains.com is also reporting that they failed to renew their domain name.

Al.com has a timeline of what happened:

10:40 a.m.: Regions has renewed its ownership of the regions.com domain, a call to Network Solutions confirmed, and is now set to expire in 2023. However, even after clearing the cache, service does not appear to have been restored to regions.com.

10:26 a.m.: Whois.net, a service that tracks domain registration, confirms that Regions’ domain expired on April 13, 2013.

9:45 a.m.: A visit to www.regions.com yields a generic web page with branding for Network Solutions, a domain-hosting service (see image, right). Attempts to access the website from several different computers in locations across the U.S. yielded mixed results, according to an informal survey conducted by AL.com.

You see? All of this could have been avoided if someone had just renewed Regions.com in the first place…for several years. Looks like they finally decided to renew the domain name for 10 years. Based on past experience, though, it won’t be up for everyone again quickly–it will take time to populate all of the lookup tables on the internet, so it could be up to another 24 hours that the site is down for some people.

Update: April 16, 2013
Regions Financial Corporation has renewed the regions.com domain name, and the expiration date on the domain name is now April 13, 2023. This just goes to show that someone at Regions really didn’t renew their domain name–and that’s why the website went down for at least 24 hours. Here’s the updated whois record:

At this point, the domain name has been renewed for another 10 years, and it should be up and running again for most people. If you’re still seeing the “parked domain” Network Solutions page, then it’s a caching issue and you either need to clear your web browser’s cache or your ISP is caching the page.

I realize that mistakes happen, and someone should have renewed the regions.com domain name. However, what I have an issue with is the fact that Regions Financial Corporation was not truthful in their updates. As soon as they knew it was a domain name renewal issue, they should have been honest with their statements. This was clearly not an “intermittent network issue”.

Someone at Regions Bank failed to pay the Network Solutions bill. Perhaps they should have used online banking to pay it?