{
  "_meta": {
    "dataset": "registrar_incidents",
    "purpose": "A dated, sourced log of registrar outages and service failures. Registrars publish status pages that are wiped clean after each event, so there is no consumer-facing memory of who has failed, for how long, and why. This is that memory.",
    "log_begins": "2026-08-24",
    "completeness_warning": "This log is NOT a complete history of the industry and must not be read as one. It begins in August 2026 and records incidents we could source. An empty record for a registrar means we have not logged an incident for it — never that none occurred. For that reason no reliability score is derived from this dataset, and none should be.",
    "inclusion_criteria": "An incident is logged when it interrupted registrar services (domain management, DNS resolution, email, or the control plane) and can be sourced to the registrar's own communication or to established industry reporting. Marketing-page wording changes and planned maintenance are not incidents.",
    "maintained_by": "best-domain-registrars.com",
    "license": "CC BY 4.0",
    "last_updated": "2026-08-24"
  },
  "incidents": [
    {
      "id": "namecheap-2026-08-phoenix-cooling",
      "registrar_id": "namecheap",
      "registrar_name": "Namecheap",
      "date": "2026-08-13",
      "title": "Phoenix data-centre cooling failure took hosting, DNS and email offline for over 30 hours",
      "duration_minutes": 1832,
      "duration_text": "30 hours 32 minutes",
      "severity": "major",
      "services_affected": [
        "hosting",
        "dns",
        "email",
        "control_panel",
        "api"
      ],
      "scope": "Namecheap reported the incident affected services across a customer base holding more than 24 million registered domains, alongside hundreds of thousands of hosted sites and around 1.4 million private email inboxes. More than 5,000 servers were taken offline.",
      "root_cause": "Cooling at the Phoenix data centre housing core infrastructure failed after repeated utility power events during overnight storms, leaving several chillers unavailable as internal temperatures rose. Because the identity and control-plane systems that authenticate users, serve the API and route DNS were concentrated in that one facility, the impact was not limited to servers physically in Phoenix.",
      "resolution": "Services were restored after 30 hours 32 minutes. Namecheap reported no data loss and said it would add redundancy across its US, European and Asian data centres.",
      "why_it_matters": "Concentration risk, not weather. A single-site control plane means one building's cooling can take a global registrar's DNS with it — which is a design question every registrar should be asked, not a freak event.",
      "sources": [
        {
          "label": "Namecheap — service outage update (official)",
          "url": "https://www.namecheap.com/blog/namecheap-service-outage-update/"
        },
        {
          "label": "Engadget — Hosting provider Namecheap is down after data center cooling failure",
          "url": "https://www.engadget.com/2236616/hosting-provider-namecheap-is-down-after-data-center-cooling-failure/"
        },
        {
          "label": "DomainGang — Phoenix datacenter cooling failure takes thousands of servers offline",
          "url": "https://domaingang.com/domain-news/namecheap-phoenix-datacenter-cooling-failure-takes-thousands-of-servers-offline/"
        }
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "godaddy-2025-12-dns-anycast",
      "registrar_id": "godaddy",
      "registrar_name": "GoDaddy",
      "date": "2025-12-12",
      "title": "Authoritative DNS interruption from an inadvertent command",
      "duration_minutes": 8,
      "duration_text": "8 minutes",
      "severity": "minor",
      "services_affected": [
        "dns"
      ],
      "scope": "Anycast access to GoDaddy's authoritative DNS was interrupted, so DNS queries for domains using GoDaddy nameservers failed for the duration. Began 21:20 GMT, restored 21:28 GMT.",
      "root_cause": "Inadvertent execution of a command affected Anycast access to the authoritative nameservers.",
      "resolution": "Access restored eight minutes later. GoDaddy published a public explanation of the interruption.",
      "why_it_matters": "Short, but it shows what authoritative DNS failure looks like: nothing is 'down' at the registrar in any visible sense, yet every domain relying on those nameservers stops resolving. Worth weighing when choosing where DNS is hosted. GoDaddy publishing a postmortem at all is a point in its favour — most registrars do not.",
      "sources": [
        {
          "label": "GoDaddy — Understanding GoDaddy's 12/12 DNS interruption (official)",
          "url": "https://www.godaddy.com/resources/news/understanding-godaddys-12-12-dns-interruption"
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}