SITE DOWN: Transfered Host from 3rd party to Shopify 7 days ago site down for 4 days

[MeansE]

The site was successfully connected before transferring the domain from 3rd party.

On 9/14 the domain transfer process started.

On 9/17 the site became unreachable. 

The site remains unreachable 5 days after it became unreachable.

It shows DNS settings in the Shopify console under Domain.

Attempts to visit the site on the Chrome browser result in the error message:

ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED

Attempts to visit the site on the Safari browser result in the message:

"Safari cannot open the page because the server cannot be found"

Attempts to visit the site on the Firefox browser result in a message:

"A server with the specified hostname could not be found."

Visit ICANN shwows updated information:

Google as the new nameservers

TUCOWS as the new registrar

Shopify as the new reseller

DNSSEC is unsigned

etc.

It looks like the transfer went through but the site is still unreachable. We need help to resolve the issue  ASAP the site has been down now for 5 days.

Thank you,

Eric

[Shay]

Hi @MeansE 

Thank you for that information! Domain transfers can take up to 10 days to be successful and if there is an error in the transfer that can take up to 20 days to process. This time frame is not set by Shopify but is the standard experience across all domain hosts through ICANN. 

To ensure that your domain transfer finishes smoothly I will include some steps for you below to double check.

During this process you should receive 4 or more emails updating you on the domain transfer as well as asking for verification and confirmation of the domain host change. Please confirm that you have received these emails below:

• You should receive an email that has confirmed that the transfer of the domain has been initiated. 
• Billing email sent Invoice for Domain registration for __ from Shopify Billing
• Set your data use consent preferences from no-reply
• Up to 2 emails for authentication
• Either “transfer succeeded” or “it failed for X reason, here are next steps & you’ve been refunded”

NOTE: AOL and YAHOO email addresses may not work for receiving emails from OPENSRS. You can update the registrar email address from within the domain settings in the admin if you need to change your email address on file. 

At this stage you should be able to see a billing charge in your admin for the new domain registration with Shopify. If you go to Settings > Billing you can see if there was a successful charge for the domain. 

If you feel that something is missing from the steps I listed above or you do not have any emails about this domain transfer, please contact our live support for a closer look: Shopify Help Center - Contact Support.

[MeansE]

Hi Shay,

Thank you for the response. That being said your response is not focused on the issue.

The issue is the site is down. 

Transferring a host should not cause a site to go down. While it takes 10 days to complete the transfer from one host to another the old host is up allowing the site to be accessible until the new host is ready to take over and has all the DNS entries up and going. 

For reference, I will link the Shopify support response to the question "will my site be down"

https://community.shopify.com/c/shopify-discussions/domain-transfer-time/td-p/654616

Also, I will link Shopify information about transferring the site. You will see that it does not caution about any downtime. 

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/domains/managing-domain-ownership/transferring-shopify-domains

Taking all this information in indicates that there is an issue on the Shopify side since ICANN is showing Shopify as the owner. The issue needs to be escalated since the site has been down for over 5 days.

It does not matter if any emails were received or not because that would not take down the site. Let's say that an authentication email was received but never responded to. All that would happen worst case is not to start the domain transfer. It wouldn't take the site down.

We know that the authorization email came in because ICANN is showing Shopify as the owner. We both know the only way that could happen is if the emails Shopify requires to have a response before starting the process have indeed been responded to.

Meanwhile, site is unreachable. Please escalate.

Thank you,

Eric

Eric

[Shay]

Hi Eric, 

Thank you for that follow up. I apologize, as you noted my initial information was wrong about the website not being up and available during the transfer. 

In this situation you will want to contact our live support so that our technical team can assist and review the domain issues on the backend. Since I am unable to authenticate merchant accounts through the community forums this will be your next step in getting this escalated. Please ensure that an authorized team member or the store account owner contacts our live support so that there are no authentication delays in getting this resolved. 

[Ryan120]

We are having the same issue here - https://community.shopify.com/c/technical-q-a/domain-transfer-outage/td-p/1950148

Was support able to help you?