Here's what totalnic had to say about the outage: ------------------------------------- Following is information on the recent  DNS outage. The duration of this outage was approximately 36 hours commencing around 6 AM US Mountain Time (8 AM US Eastern Time/1 PM GMT). Many domain names were impacted including quite a few belonging to TotalNIC.net customers, including the TotalNIC.net domain itself. The TotalNIC customer service and engineering taskforce became aware of this problem and worked aggressively to resolve this in conjunction with staff of the central registry operator.  At first we were advised by the registry that the problem would be resolved within approximately 6 hours (8 PM US Eastern Nov. 17, 2001/1 AM GMT Nov. 18,2001).  Unfortunately this was not to be the case - the problem was only partially resolved and, for those names not fixed at that time, the outage escalated.  Our staff monitored the situation and put into place a second strategy for resolving the problem when it became evident that the registry's strategy had failed to adequately resolve the outage.  Because of the size of the COM/NET/ORG DNS zonefiles it takes the registry over 8 hours to generate and make this data available to the Internet - this means that any issues in relation to those data files can take a significant period of time to rectify. To our knowledge, this situation was completely rectified by 8 PM US Eastern Nov. 18, 2001/1 AM GMT Nov. 19,2001. During the emergency fix that was put into place by our staff on the 18th, we intentionally bypassed our own site's WHOIS and domain management tools for the impacted domain names. While we understand that this caused additional concern, we felt that this inconvenience was in our customer's best interest in resolving the DNS issues. Full service on the TotalNIC.net site was returned at 4 PM Eastern US/7 PM GMT on Nov. 19, 2001. We do understand the serious impact that this has had on you when you are relying upon your domain name service being maintained. Whilst this situation could have affected customers of any registrar we are deeply concerned that this impacted TotalNIC.net customers. We have worked with all of the parties involved to ensure that outages like this cannot occur in the future. TotalNIC apologizes profusely for the inconvenience caused and any loss you may have occasioned as a consequence of this outage. Please note that in an unrelated issue, the phone lines at our US offices were temporarily shorted out. This caused what sounded like hang-ups to many customers attempting to contact our updated service status message. TotalNIC.net staff worked with local phone providers to resolve this issue. This was completed by 2 PM Eastern US time, Nov. 19, 2001. We do encourage you to contact us if you have any further queries in relation to this matter. Thank you for your understanding and for your continued support. -- Vincent S. Hamm Director American OperationsCapital Networks/TotalNICThank you for using http://icann.TotalNIC.net the original half-price domain registrar. On Friday 16 November 2001 02:00 pm, Mike Lewinski wrote:

Anyone know what's up with Registrar services from totalnic.net (AU)? We had a client register a domain with them a couple days ago. That new domain was working yesterday, but has since disappeared from the gtld root servers.

The domain totalnic.net is itself missing from gtld roots (whois shows their own domain is paid through 2010).

So, if a given Registrar were suffering a complete loss of connectivity, would that affect their entries at the gtld roots? Or is this more likely a result of some type of dispute/unpaid bills with ICANN?

TIA,

Mike