14 DAY TRIAL // SomethingAwful.com, the comedy website hosting a huge amount of humorous content, went offline a few days ago, apparently because of some DNS problems. Nobody knew for sure what had happened there, so people started asking questions on the website's forum. No less than seven forum pages got full of users' questions, but no official posted any message to explain the outage and provide a solution.
That was until yesterday, when Generic Admin published a message on the forum saying, according to The Register, that "we're still trying to find out exactly what happened. The nameservers on our domain record were reset to the Network Solutions nameservers. I called NS support, and they said that someone had logged in the NS domain manager and clicked on 'manage DNS' or something, and that reset it. There are only two people with the network solutions login, and neither of us have logged in or made any change."
The good thing about this downtime is that no information was stolen, as the website doesn't host any private detail, the same person explained.
"Nothing on our network appears compromised. Someone logged in at Network Solutions and played with the nameserver settings. We're not happy about it, but let's keep things in perspective. SA does not store full credit card numbers (only last four digits), expiration dates, or CVV2 codes. Our merchant provider recently conducted an audit to make sure we were complying with the king's laws of Internet business, and apparently we passed with flying colors", he continued.
At this time, the website is accessible for every user out there, as the problems have recently been fixed. However, if you want to get more details about the outage, you can read the seven-page forum discussion hosted by the SomethingAwful's website, available on this link.