If you're a major online retailer pumped up for the 2000 holiday season, the last thing you need is some administrative snafu that suspends your main URL and bars online shoppers from your Web site. Last Wednesday, Dec. 13, that's exactly what happened to Barnesandnoble.com.
For several hours on that day, anyone who typed in "www.bn.com" found that the Web page was unavailable. The reason: a "technical glitch" involving registration of the BN.com domain name by Network Solutions (dossier).
One savvy book shopper, Paul Jeffries, of Houston, noticed that BN.com was down but that Barnesandnoble.com was working fine. He guessed that the problem might be the same one that afflicted Microsoft (MSFT) a year ago. During holiday 1999, an unpaid $35 registration fee for the Passport.com Web site brought down the Redmond company's Hotmail service for hours. On that occasion, an alert Linux developer named Michael Chaney went to the Network Solutions site and paid the fee on Microsoft's behalf. (Chaney later got a $500 thank-you check from Microsoft. He then auctioned off the check, raising more than $7,000 for charity.)
Emulating Chaney, Jeffries promptly went to the Network Solutions site and paid for a renewal of the BN.com registration with his credit card. The next day, he sent off an e-mail to Barnesandnoble.com informing the company of his good deed on its behalf. A post-doctoral research associate in Rice University's physics and astronomy department, Jeffries is trying in his spare time to get an Internet startup off the ground, so he could stand to benefit from some Chaney-like fame.
Network Solutions isn't yet providing information on Jeffries' transaction, so it isn't certain that nonpayment of the domain registration fee was the problem and that Jeffries solved it. But a few hours after he paid up, the BN.com URL was working again.
Gus Carlson, a spokesman for Barnesandnoble.com, confirmed that service for site visitors using the BN.com URL was interrupted for a few hours on that day. The site was still accessible via the Barnesandnoble.com URL and through AOL (dossier)'s network, however.
"We circled back with Network Solutions and solved the problem," says Carlson. "It was resolved with minimal interruption to our customers."
A year ago when this happened to Microsoft, the software giant blamed the problem on an oversight by Network Solutions. Barnesandnoble.com, for its part, is adamant that its similar problem last week wasn't for lack of a $35 registration fee.
"According to our records, we paid for our URL in full by the deadline," says Carlson. "As far as we're concerned, we were up to date."
Jeffries says that when he looked at the domain registration site, the fee apparently had been unpaid since October. But a few hours after he paid the one-year renewal fee, he received an e-mail notification from Network Solutions indicating that the BN.com account was now paid up until Oct. 2003.
Will Jeffries get some kudos for his payment? Perhaps not. Barnesandnoble.com confirms that he did contact the company after the fact, though it is unwilling to comment on a transaction between Jeffries and Network Solutions.
"The problem may lie at the Network Solutions end," says Carlson.
A Network Solutions representative, while confirming that "technical problems" occurred, would not comment, saying that it was a matter between Network Solutions and its customer, Barnesandnoble.com.
