South Africa’s ZA Central Registry (ZACR) the company tasked with administering second-level domains of the .ZA namespace that includes .org.za has reportedly suspended thousands of org.za domains this week due to them not being transferred from a legacy system to ZACR-accredited Registrars.
The suspended domains all org.za names that had not migrated across to new Registrars includes some 15 000 org.za domains. The ZACR previously stated that a substantial number of domains were not associated with a ZACR-accredited registrar following their migration to its EPP system.
Domains which had not been moved to an accredited registrar by 1 September 2016 would be suspended, warned the ZACR and ZADNA, and would be “unreachable on the Internet”.
Domains which have not moved to an accredited registrar by 1 September 2017 will be deleted from the registry.
A south African blog, MyBroadband reports receiving multiple reports that over 15,000 org.za domains have been suspended this week due to the policy. The blog also says that several org.za websites resulted in a
“This site cannot be reached” message, including the Advertising Standards Authority and Cosatu’s pages.
The escalation of this suspension and the complaints could be pointing to a larger management issue within the domain manager and could result in bigger management problems that may leave registrants in limbo.