ICANN Provides Updates On New TLD System Outage

ICANN posted another update on the new TLD application system’s outage earlier this morning.

At the moment ICANN is still investigating the issue and working on a fix.

They intend to make clarify when the application will be back online by 2359 UTC on Monday 16 April.

Here’s the full statement:

Statement by Akram Atallah, COO

As we have reported, ICANN has learned of a technical issue with the TLD application system software, or TAS, that allowed a limited number of users to view some other users’ file names and user names in certain scenarios. We temporarily shut the system down on 12 April 2012 to protect applicant data, and to look into the technical issue and fix it.

As part of that process, we are sifting through the thousands of customer service inquiries received since the opening of the application submission period. This preliminary review has identified a user report on 19 March that appears to be the first report related to this technical issue.

Although we believed the issues identified in the initial and subsequent reports had been addressed, on 12 April we confirmed that there was a continuing unresolved issue and we shut down the system.

We are still aggressively looking into the issue, and we will publish additional information as soon as it can be confirmed.

We recognize the importance of reopening the application system as soon as possible. We will announce no later than 23:59 GMT/UTC on Monday, 16 April, whether we will be able to reopen on Tuesday, 17 April 2012.

Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue.

The outage has garnered quite a bit of media attention in the last couple of days and, as Stephane Van Gelder rightly points out, how ICANN handles the communications around this is key.

Others, however, have used the issue to question the entire newTLD program.

Related articles

• ICANN New TLD application deadline extended to April 20 (domainnamewire.com)
• ICANN data breach exposes gTLD applicant data, leads to deadline extension (arstechnica.com)
• ICANN Knew About The TAS Problem On March 19th (thedomains.com)