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Fresh Direct Fiasco: Company Criticized After Domain Name Mess
By
Ben Yakas
Published Dec 26, 2012
Modified Dec 27, 2012
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By
Ben Yakas
Published Dec 26, 2012
Modified Dec 27, 2012
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New Yorkers have long relied on Fresh Direct the way Frodo relied on Samwise Gamgee—when all hope is lost and the overwhelming urge to order Famiglia's arises, FD will be there to remind us that when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer, and oh yeah, fresh asparagus is on sale. So when the company's website went down mysteriously for many people over the last 48 hours, things seemed bad. And when word spread that all the troubles may have been caused because Fresh Direct didn't renew their domain name, well then the Twitter pitchforks really came out. But it seems people may have turned on their delivery overlords a bit too quickly.
According to Bloomberg, FD's site provider Network Solutions LLC confirmed the company had paid for its domain-name renewal—the outage was caused by update delays on systems that are farther away from the home server. This is what Fresh Direct wrote on their Facebook this morning:
We are sorry about the site outages being experienced by some of our customers with Time Warner and Verizon Wireless. We’ve identified the problem and we are working to quickly resolve it.
Rest assured we are still open and are making deliveries. Customers with Verizon Fios, Sprint Wireless, T-mobile Wireless, and Optimum online should be able to access the site.
Thank you again for your patience and understanding as we work with the Internet providers to get this fixed.
The site is working for us fine now, but some people on the aforementioned networks still can't get it up—initially, the company had estimated everything should have been back to normal by 2 p.m., but that's obviously not true, judging by their apology-ridden Twitter account. At least Fresh Direct can sleep tightly knowing they didn't ruin Christmas for anyone quite as badly as certain other companies did.
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delivery
domain names
fresh direct
frustration
rumors
Ben Yakas
Ben Yakas is a former Gothamist reporter.
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