Notion went offline for hours due to phishing complaints to its domain registrar: Report

Organisation and workspace management service Notion went down for hours last Friday, leaving users and customers completely in the lurch. Now a news report suggests that the outage and downtime were caused due to the company’s domain registrar receiving several complaints about phishing.

According to a report from Techcrunch, the outage was caused due to what it called a very unusual DNS issue at the registry operator level. What this means is that the site spent hours offline and did not resolve for many users. With the domain not resolving, many customers could not access their organisational tools like their reminders and notes.

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The report goes on the state that Notion had registered their domain with the registrar Name.com - who had basically partnered with another company called Hexonet to manage the .so domain, which reportedly received complaints about Notion pages used for phishing. The firm went to Name.com with their reports and the site was then temporarily suspended, the report states.

Users and customers alike panicked on Friday when the app went offline, depriving them of their important documents - after all, Notion’s service provider did not verify the reports before putting a hold on the domain - which is interesting.

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This isn’t the first time that a service was deeply impacted due to a complaint made by unscrupulous users who simply report the app for spam. However, in order to prevent users from suffering from an outage like this again, a Name.com employee reportedly told TechCrunch that teams were working on new protocols to make sure an outage like last Friday doesn’t happen again.