I was actually trying to get to the EverQuest forums this morning. There was a rumor going around about the Fippy Darkpaw Progression Server. It was possible that one of the raiding guilds was going to down-vote the unlock of the next expansion, Underfoot, because they wanted a couple more weeks to farm gear from the current expansion live on the server, Seeds of Destruction. There hasn’t been a down vote since the Gates of Discord fiasco back in mid-2012, when that expansion was voted down three times running before finally going live in June.
Pure rumor, with likely nothing behind it, but it is so rare to hear anything about the server that I thought I would follow it up and see it anybody mentioned on the results on forums. Only I couldn’t get to the forums.
Sony Online Entertainment appeared to be down.
A quick run through the usual sources turned up a post by the ever vigilant Feldon at EQ2 Wire, who noted that SOE had somehow forgotten to renew one of its underlying domains, sonyonline.net, and that, after a considerable grace period, fell off the internet. Since SOE uses that domain for its own name resolution for its sites and games, that pretty much kicked the company offline.
It is Tuesday, we were expecting downtime in any case, right?
Word is that SOE has reclaimed the domain and that it should be propagating across the net even as we speak. If you are in a hurry to get to an SOE site, Feldon has some tips over at EQ2 Wire on how to speed things up.
The question remains though, how did this happen? The rumor is that the email address receiving such notices from Network Solutions had gone unattended. That is speculation, of course, but I have enough experience to know that if you lay enough people off, something important like that will get missed. And, hey presto, your domain resolves to a site offering EverQuest and WoW gold!
What I saw on my iPad this morning
Interesting that EverQuest gold (which should be platinum) is still a thing. I thought inflation, F2P, and general old age issues had killed the currency market for EQ.
Anyway, not exactly in the same league as the 12+ days of downtime SOE experienced back in 2011, but it is still an SOE thing.
Addendum: Smed speaks
I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but who gave Network Solutions the “wrong email?”
Better.
Addendum: TechDirt sums it all up.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 