Domain gaffe forces banks offline

The banking group which owns Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks in the UK has admitted that a schoolboy error forced both brands’ websites – cbonline.co.uk and ybonline.co.uk – offline for days, leaving banking customers unable to access their accounts.
According to reports, the National Australian Bank (NAB), which runs both Clydesdale and Yorkshire, forgot to renew its main domain name in time, meaning all its sites went down.
Although the individual banks had remembered to renew their UK domains a month ago, NAB failed to renew nab.group.com, which controlled every other group site, in time.
With the group’s DNS server – the technology which translates website names into IP addresses – offline, online customers were left in the lurch.
A spokesman for Easyspace, the company that the UK domain names are registered with, said: “Nabgroup.com is managed directly by the NAB Group – that’s the domain name they didn’t renew in time.
“So basically it meant that all their other domains that are managed through their DNS, suddenly went offline. NAB Group controls their online presence and networks – by not renewing that domain on time, all the other domains that they have globally from various providers that are routed through it will have gone offline.”
Both Clydesdale and Yorkshire have apologised to customers and said most should now be able to log on as normal.