"registrarsafe.com" is back up. It is, indeed, Facebook's very own registrar for Facebook's own domains. "RegistrarSEC, LLC and RegistrarSafe, LLC are ICANN-accredited registrars formed in Delaware and are wholly-owned subsidiaries of Facebook, Inc. We are not accepting retail domain name registrations." Their address is Facebook HQ in Menlo Park.
That's what you have to do to really own a domain.
Wow, I had no idea it was so cheap[1] once you're a registrar. The implication is that anyone who wants to be a domain squatting tycoon should become a registrar. For an annual cost of a few thousand dollars plus $0.18 per domain name registered, you can sit on top of hundreds of thousands of domain names. Locking up one million domain names would cost you only $180,000 a year. Anytime someone searched for an unregistered domain name on your site, you could immediately register it to yourself for $0.18, take it off the market, and offer to sell it to the buyer at a much inflated price. Does ICANN have rules against this? Surely this is being done?
[1] "Transaction-based fees - these fees are assessed on each annual increment of an add, renew or a transfer transaction that has survived a related add or auto-renew grace period. This fee will be billed at USD 0.18 per transaction." as quoted from https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/registrar-billin...
Personally saw this kind of thing as early as 2001.
Never search for free domains on the registar site unless you are going to register it immediately. Even whois queries can trigger this kind of thing, although that mostly happens on obscure gtld/cctld registries which have a single registrar for the whole tld.
I searched for a domain that I couldn't immediately grab (one of more expensive kind) using a random free whois site... and when I revisited the domain several weeks later it was gone :'(
Emailed the site's new owner D: but fairly predictably got no reply.
Lesson learned, and thankfully on a domain that wasn't the absolute end of the world.
I now exclusively do all my queries via the WHOIS protocol directly. Welp.
Probably every major retail registrar was rumored to do this at some point. Add to your calculation that even some heavyweights like GoDaddy (IIRC) tend to run ads on domains that don't have IPs specified.
You are off by a factor of almost 50.
https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/registry-agreements/com/c...
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/correspondence/stewart...
https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/icann-and-ver...
They want you to have $70k liquid.
https://torrentfreak.com/icann-refuses-to-accredit-pirate-ba...
To be fair, we did have to get an email from eurid recently for a transfer auth code, but that was only because our registrar was not willing to provide.
In any case, no, they will not need to send an email to fix this issue.
So yes, the registrar that is to blame is themselves.
Source: I know someone within the company that works in this capacity.
That’s not how it works. The info of whether a domain name is available is provided by the registry, not by the registrars. It’s usually done via a domain:check EPP command or via a DAS system. It’s very rare for registrar to registrar technical communication to occur.
Although the above is the clean way to do it, it’s common for registrars to just perform a dig on a domain name to check if it’s available because it’s faster and usually correct. In this case, it wasn’t.
I'm not sure of all the implications of those circular dependencies, but it probably makes it harder to get things back up if the whole chain goes down. That's also probably why we're seeing the domain "facebook.com" for sale on domain sites. The registrar that would normally provide the ownership info is down.
Anyway, until "a.ns.facebook.com" starts working again, Facebook is dead.