Zoho Corporation, also known as Zoho CRM, had their entire domain name taken down by their registrar Tierranet (aka DomainDiscover). According to a Tweet by Zoho CRM’s CEO Sridhar Vembu, they were trying to understand why the domain was taken down entirely.
We are working hard to identify why the domain was taken down by the registrar in the first place. Once we do that, we will take alternative steps so this never happens. We apologize sincerely but this issue is well beyond our control and our domain was taken down with no notice!
Later, posted a message on Hacker News, saying:
Our domain was abruptly blocked by our registrar this morning. Our NOC team and myself tried to get in touch with them and they tell us “Contact our legal”. Even I could not get in touch with anyone beyond their phone operator. The domain was restored, but as DNS takes time to restore, we are still facing issues. They later claimed there were abuse complaints about Zoho.com emails (which is our personal email service with millions of free and paid users). We received a total of 3 complaints from them and two of them have been acted upon and one is under investigation.
Once we dig our way out of this, we will find ways make sure no one takes down our domain again this way.
I suspect that there were abuse complaints to the domain registrar, and certain email addresses from @zoho.com email addresses were being used to send spam. It’s quite possible that the amount of spam that was being sent was enough for the registrar to take action and take the domain name down entirely. Based on other information I’ve seen, Zoho CRM has moved their DNS, so it will take some time for it to populate across the internet.
Douglas Muth also pointed out that the DMARC records are not properly set up for the Zoho CRM domain, which is another issue entirely, although somewhat related. Your domain name’s DNS records need their DMARC records set up properly, which will aid in the deliverability of emails.
