Yatra.com faces outage after forgetting to renew domain name

One of India's popular travel-booking website Yatra.com faced an outage over the weekend as the company forgot to renew the domain name.Users who had tried to access the site on Saturday and Sunday found that the website was not working and the message they got was 'Domain has expired.' As this report on tech2 points out, The site name had been registered on August 9, 2000 and expired on August 9,2013. Meanwhile, since the name was active for so long, it looks like renewing the domain name simply slipped from the Yatra bosses’ minds.You can also check out a tweet below which shows the blunder:

Blunder by a Monster.... http://t.co/klUO3t9OoA forgets to Renew Domain. Site dwn 4 days... apparfently finally fixed pic.twitter.com/sqhpSr0F34 — Vineet Yadav (@geniusvineet) August 13, 2013

According to a report in Times of India Dhruv Shringi, co-founder and CEO of Yatra, said, "Though the expiry of the domain name could be technically true, we are still trying to assess the root cause of the problem." The fact that Yatra had forgotten to renew its domain name also caused quite a stir on Twitter.During the outage, Yatra however insisted that technical issues were responsible for trouble with the website. The company said on Twitter, "Dear customers, our site is down due to technical reasons. We are working on this." The company also said that the technical difficulties with DNS servers were not allowing users to access the site.[caption id="attachment_1030221" align="alignleft" width="380"]

The message that users saw on Yatra.[/caption]On Monday, the company tweeted, "Dear Customers, We are back on the reliance network and working on other ISP's. Thank you for your continuous love and support." A report in the Hindu says that the gaffe was certainly no laughing matter as the temporary shutdown may have cost the company anywhere between Rs 20 – 30 crore in sales, according to industry insiders. Here are few tweets discussing the Yatra outage:

#yatra.com Should make sure that it pay E-bill and other utility bill So They dont switch off #PC #servers ... — Srinivasan (@Srinivasanlogin) August 13, 2013

#yatra.com is still down. What a major goof up in modern times by the travel website. #PR crisis! Interesting to see how they manage it! — sayan banerjee (@sayanbanerjee85) August 12, 2013Makes me feel so bad-- http://t.co/k26eLj4auZ expired. As if its a person. Wish the company overcomes tough situation.

— Vijay Shekhar (@vijayshekhar) August 11, 2013

For now the Yatra site is back on. Hopefully they won't make such a gaffe again.