No peace for Gandi this past weekend, after storage SNAFU breaks email and more
- Reference: 1741651941
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/03/11/gandi_domain_registrar_outage/
- Source link:
The problems started on Saturday and were investigated by Gandi from the early hours of Sunday. The Parisian outfit, which serves customers globally and is owned by Total Webhosting Solutions these days, has not provided a detailed reason for the IT breakdown – but blamed an issue with a filer storage system for the unavailability of multiple services, including email delivery and fetching, site hosting, and user account logins.
"We identified an issue on a specific filer in production that affected multiple API and microservices on the platform," the hosting provider [1]said on a status page update.
[2]
The outfit stated email services should be back on their feet, though clearing the backlog of messages would take time. "We are continuing to monitor for any further issues," the biz said earlier. "Service are back to normal to the majority of customers."
[3]
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Earlier, the provider [5]acknowledged on social media: "We are experiencing difficulties that may impact several services ... the teams are working to resolve them as quickly as possible."
Several readers contacted The Register to complain about service disruptions. One reported that on Saturday, March 8, as of 1730 UTC, SMTP, IMAP and POP3 were all toast for email activity, Roundcube and Sogo webmail access was out, and other features were down.
X offline, Elon blames Ukrainian IPs
Gandi's not the only one having a bad day. Elon Musk's X, the site better known as Twitter, faced intermittent outages on Monday, which the billionaire blamed on a cyberattack.
There were [6]four major spikes in complaints on Downdetector.com from netizens unable to access X over the past few hours. Dark Storm, a pro-Palestinian activist group, [7]reportedly claimed responsibility, though Elon has his own theories.
"We're not sure exactly what happened but there was a massive cyberattack that tried to bring down the X system with IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area," he [8]told Fox News on Monday. Uh-huh. Interesting timing right after US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Musk [9]clashed with Poland's foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski over the use of the SpaceX supremo's Starlink satellite broadband in Ukraine.
Normal services on the social media site have been resumed, the Tesla tycoon claimed.
While Gandi's DNS appeared unaffected, email forwarding from Gandi-hosted sites to non-Gandi inboxes was nonfunctional, leaving his Protonmail inbox empty, our fan told us Monday. "My IMAP is back since 0830 UTC, but webmail seems a bit off."
All in all, not exactly the best way to mark the biz's 25th anniversary. Gandi launched in 2000 as a low-cost, independent alternative to the big players, and focused on reinvesting any profit it made into its business. It claims it manages over 2.5 million domain names across 800+ TLDs, offering services including SSL certificates, web hosting, and VPS. It has subsidiaries in the US and Asia.
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The business built its reputation as a developer-friendly company that avoided traditional advertising, relying instead on word of mouth. It has also supported organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and Spamhaus, providing donations and free domain services.
[11]'No BS' web host Gandi lives up to half of its motto... Some customer data wiped out in storage server meltdown
[12]Google begs owners of crippled Chromecasts not to hit factory reset
[13]Elon's latest X-periment: Blocked users can still stalk your public tweets
[14]Facebook, Threads, WhatsApp, Instagram stumble on and offline in global outage
Acquired twice in the past six years, Gandi changed hands first in 2019 when private equity firm Montefiore Investment took over, followed by a 2023 merger with Total Webhosting Solutions (now Your.Online). After the latest acquisition, free email services were discontinued in favor of a subscription-only model.
The shift led to an exodus of users seeking alternatives, and the recent outage may accelerate that trend. Frustration has grown among customers, with some voicing concerns over what they see as a [15]slow response to the disruption.®
Get our [16]Tech Resources
[1] https://status.gandi.net/incidents/xqmz5bjjg8lf
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z8_Dec-50EBNIS38RKvTtQAAAY4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z8_Dec-50EBNIS38RKvTtQAAAY4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z8_Dec-50EBNIS38RKvTtQAAAY4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://x.com/gandi_net/status/1899080300300267955
[6] https://downdetector.com/status/twitter/
[7] https://www.newsweek.com/x-twitter-outage-dark-storm-live-updates-2042333
[8] https://x.com/BRICSinfo/status/1899200508398575663
[9] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy87vg38dnpo
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/storage&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z8_Dec-50EBNIS38RKvTtQAAAY4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/09/gandi_loses_customer_data/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/10/google_chromecast_outage/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/24/x_block_changes/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/11/wednesday_meta_outage/
[15] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43307942
[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
A friend suggested Gandi out of the blue. At the time all US-based hosts were sus so it was interesting to deal with the French. Seemed competent and modestly caring. I have a tiny web traffic running 24/7 so I know uptime has been good for the price. As the article hints, there have been changes, not yet enough to drive me away. But I don't renew further ahead than I can afford to walk away from.
I no longer recommend them after what they did with the email service*, but they were good before and all the domain registrar services are still as I renewed for a while. While I'll probably leave them when my domains need renewing, I haven't yet decided whether to do so.
* Gandi used to advertise a basic free email service included with the purchase of domains. This was very useful in my experience for small projects that didn't need a full mailserver but wanted to have some domain-based mail. In 2023, they canceled this service without reducing the price, which is annoying but I could understand it, but where they annoyed me is that they also canceled it for domains purchased before, thus removing the service from people who had already paid for it. While I'm otherwise satisfied with Gandi's services, I kind of feel that I should leave them for what I view as an underhanded practice, changing the terms during the previously-arranged time.
Now, why on earth would people be upset with Elon?
Hmmmmm
These days, I don't believe a single word Musk says. I am also disappointed he is associated with SpaceX, because I think SpaceX is great. It's funny how association can muddy one's perception. Musk didn't even start Tesla (he conned and bullied his way to ownership) but I can't help but hope everything he is associated with fails, and Tesla seems to be heading that way.
Oh, c'mon, Elon ...
... Shirley it must have been Biden wot done did it!
Maybe he didn't get the official W H memo.