Domain registrar, website host, and email provider Gandi.net suffered a major outage over the weekend. The latest update from the French biz, some 14 hours ago, stated it was "still working on resolving all the issues," which we understand to mean it has largely fixed itself by now.
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 said on a status page update.
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."
Earlier, the provider 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.
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.
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.
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 slow response to the disruption.®