from Hacker News

.ly domain reseller suspended by SoftLayer citing US/UN Sanctions

by strebel on 3/31/11, 10:06 PM with 3 comments

My contact at libyanspider.com has informed me that his hosting and DNS service at SoftLayer.com has been shut down citing UN/US/ Presidential Order of sanctions against Libya.

Some ~12,000 sites owned by ~5000 Libyan and International customers are offline or unreachable, 20 employees out of work.

LibyanSpider is the largest reseller I think of .ly domains. They also offer other DNS and internet services.

Softlayer was kind enough to add "Best of luck in your future endeavors." to their notice before even shutting off his support system account. *wince

[quote] Unfortunately, your account has been reclaimed due OFAC violations. With the current situation abroad and subsequent changes to the list, your account has been deactivated immediately.

OFAC: http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/Pages/Programs.aspx

Best of luck in your future endeavors,

SoftLayer Accounting [/quote]

If anyone has a contact at the NYTimes/Washington Post or similar, I have some more details I was asked to share with a responsible journalist.

ping me @strebel PS: this has no affect on our service at page.ly, but I feel for the guy, a small business owner, getting caught up in geo-politics.

  • by strebel on 4/3/11, 4:56 AM

    My contact said after a barrage of complaints from his customers, softlayer restored his service.

  • by omarchowdhury on 4/1/11, 4:06 PM

    So... how am I supposed to access my domain?

  • by haploid on 3/31/11, 10:31 PM

    Hahaha. Oh good ol' post-merger SoftLayer.

    This is nothing new for them. They have a long history of violating their own TOS and shutting down customers, without warning, for arbitrary and capricious reasons, then blaming/citing someone else for "making" them do it.

    See Wikileaks and SimpleCDN for the most visible examples; there are many more, though.

    We left SL last year and couldn't be happier.