Remember that t.co outage from yesterday? You know, the one where nobody could resolve a single link that had been shared via Twitter? Turns out that was the fault of Australian hosting company, MelbourneIT. Oh dear. Here’s how it went down.
CNET has an email from MelbourneIT representatives saying that it was a member of their policy team that caused Twitter to hit the wall all over the world for 40 minutes yesterday.
It’s being reported that a phishing complaint was being investigated by a MelbourneIT staffer, and without even thinking about it, that investigator put the t.co domain on hold until it could be sorted out. That caused a Twitter meltdown as links stopped resolving.
Here’s the statement from MelbourneIT reported by CNET:
Melbourne IT’s domain policy team is active in investigating requests from registries and the public about potential abuse of domains (including phishing sites) registered via Melbourne IT or its resellers.
We take each request seriously and if our investigations show that there is clear evidence of phishing or malware we can shut the domain down to protect consumers… We have been in contact with Twitter, and are reviewing our investigation and verification processes.
It’s usually better to be safe than sorry with phishing investigations, but not in this instance. Must try harder, MelbourneIT. Especially since this is the second serious, international incident in recent memory. [CNET]