Google.ie search service outage....hijacked?

Google.ie

One for the Diary

The Google Ireland  search service (Google.ie) has been down for a few hours now.
 As we were investigating DNS issues on a client's project domain a few hours ago (14:00hrs BST) we also ran Whois and Dig lookups on google.ie and it reported that the nameservers were ns(x).farahatz.net rather than the expected ns(x).google.com.  It appears that the nameserver information for google.ie at the IE Domain registry was altered "inadvertantly"

Whois on farahatx.net reports registration to someone in Jakarta, Indonesia.

CAUSE: it's not a DNS hack as the IEDR DNS service seems fully functional, I suppose if one was dramatic one could refer to it as a "Hijack", but more likely to be either an unauthorized change by an employee or an or agent (IEDR/Google/eMarkmonitor Inc), or some third party guessed, found, discovered the IEDR control panel access to the domain and made a mischievous change.



Impact?

Online Sales Calls will have dramatically dropped off during the outage period for those websites that rank on page one of google.ie for searches relating to their product or service. As Google.ie is a local search service, search resilts are biaed to show local websites, (i.e. websites with Irish IP addresses).

Interestingly while some loss of revenue may be experienced by Irish websites it will have probably lead to an increase in click revenue to Google as people (using google.com) only see relevant search results in the advertisement area.


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UPDATE: (16:00 hrs BST) It seems that the original namserver information has now been restored ... so expect google.ie to be back in 8-12 hours or so. (DNS replication delays)
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UPDATE: (18:00 hrs BST) Service Restored. It has also been reported that Google Ireland has apologised to users with a spokesperson for the company reported as saying earlier it was aware that some people were having difficulties accessing the Irish site, and it was working to fix the problem. He went on to apologise to those experiencing issues.
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