on the 31st of December, 02, VeriSign was no longer the registry operator for .org. The new registrar is called "Public Interest Registry" One can only speculate why the whois servers have vanished, however it should be noted that as of about an hour ago, all sorts of odd whois output was being served - including incorrect contact information for domains -- for example, all Dotster-registered .org domains now show a Mr. George Decarlo as the registrant, admin, billing and tech contact. You can use their web-based whois for the time being, but again, be warned that the data is very much incorrect at this point. http://www.pir.org/whois/ - Tim In previous mail, alex@yuriev.com said:
Is there a new top-level whois server or did shared registry whois stop providing references to the appropriate whois servers for .org? At least a pair of domain registars cannot adjust any .org records claiming that the domains not exist.
Alex --