Dreamhost either failed to renew its domain name, or VeriSign messed up a renewal or transfer. I know this because I host a personal blog, Discourse.net at Dreamhost, and yesterday I got the following message from them:
Attention all DreamHost customers,
Happy Birthday To Us! Due to a problem renewing our dreamhost.com domain registration, it lapsed today.
This means that until the root DNS servers update showing dreamhost.com as being
renewed, all dreamhost.com subdomains will be down.
We have already put up a working copy of the Web Panel at https://panel.dreamhost.net
We also have a working email box for support. This is support@dreamhost.net
Because DNS is a decentralized system, these problems will sporadically affect
all of you,
but sometimes in different ways.
ALL CUSTOMER WEBSITES THAT ARE NOT SUBDOMAINS OF DREAMHOST.COM ARE UNAFFECTED.
When trying to access your server using Telnet, FTP, or SSH, be sure you use
yourdomain.com, NOT server.dreamhost.com (as it won't work).
For a brief period of time this evening, mail was bouncing for some people.
This has been
fixed (the MX records have been changed to use dreamhost.net).
The root servers next update tomorrow at noon (eastern time). DNS servers often
cache information, so it may take up to one day for some service providers to see our
domain again.
Complicating matters is Verisign's recent decision to automatically resolve any
non-existent (or expired) domains to an IP they control. This is why mail was
bouncing (instead of deferring), and is why for some people dreamhost.com (and it's subdomains) may seem to resolve to Verisign. As soon as dreamhost.com's all sorted out tomorrow at noon this will stop.
We will keep you updated as the situation progresses, and rest assured we are
all drinking plenty of coffee.
Again these are up and working!:
https://panel.dreamhost.net
support@dreamhost.net
Happy DreamHost "Dude, Where's My Domain?" Team!
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Thank you for taking the time to read this announcement,
The DreamHost Announcement Team