TAIPEI—The undersea cable interruption caused by the Hengchun Earthquake 1 on the evening of December 26 at Pingdong Coast resulted in the abrupt loss of nearly 10,000 .Com domains in mainland China because the owners couldn’t renew their service.
According to a report by Beijing Times , more than 9,000 .Com domains were unofficially deleted due to their failure to renew their memberships on time. The number of .Com customers who lost registered domains increased 10-fold than usual after the earthquake.
Liu Ningbo, a Chinese Internet staff member, said that some .Com domain registration servers are located in foreign countries. To register a .Com domain, or update the data and renew a membership, you have to connect to an overseas server first. However, due to the cable interruption, a number of investors couldn’t update their .Com data, which led to difficulty in maintaining their .Com domains.
Liu also said that those who lost their .Com domains are either individual investors or large-scale enterprises. Now, a number of .Com domains used by the enterprises have been snatched by overseas .Com investors, which caused the loss of those businesses.
According to the report, as the repair of the undersea cable will take nearly a month, the Chinese .Com domain registration server will continue to be down.
Note [1]: Two earthquakes scaling 7.2 and 6.7 took place at Hengchun, Pingdong Coast at 8:26 and 8:34 pm on December 26 2006. The epicenter was located 15 kilometers from Taiwan and about 350 kilometers from the coastline of China.
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