Nearly eight hours after The Advocate website went down this morning, as many as half the publication’s online readers are still unable to access it.
Publisher Dan Shea says the newspaper lost digital service in the Baton Rouge and Lafayette markets around 7:30 a.m., when The Advocate’s domain name expired. Shea says the name should have been renewed automatically but was not. He could not yet say why.
Almost immediately after discovering the problem, The Advocate renewed its domain name, Shea says. But it takes time for individual Internet service providers like Cox and AT&T to update their lists of current domain names. In some cases, the process can take several hours.
“It takes the individual ISPs different amounts of time to renew their lists of DNS addresses,” Shea says. “I’d say we have about half the ISPs running (as of 2:30 p.m.).”
Shea says it could be 18 hours before all the paper’s online readers are again able to access the online publication. In the meantime, The Advocate’s Facebook page is referring readers to the webpage of The New Orleans Advocate, which was not affected because it is registered under a different domain name.
“It’s very unfortunate,” he says.
Shea says the issue was unrelated to the paper’s move to its new headquarters off Interstate 10 near Siegen Lane, which began today.
—Stephanie Riegel
