Marketo suffers major outage after domain renewal fail

Marketing automation service provider Marketo has apologised after it failed to renew its main website domain, leading to a large-scale outage.

CEO Steve Lucas “profusely apologised” for the mishap on Twitter, which was partially resolved when a customer spotted the unregistered domain and renewed it before someone else could.

The domain had been set up for automatic renewal but the process somehow failed. Lucas said the company had so far “identified process errors with auto renewals as well as human errors” in the initial post-mortem.

Marketo.com was back online at noon PDT on July 25 – 5am Sydney time on Wednesday.

However, global DNS propagation of the changes was still causing users some issues, and Lucas invited anyone still affected today to email him directly.

Network monitoring company Thousandeyes said in a blog post that while Marketo’s team “may have reached out to major networks and ISPs to have them flush their DNS caches in order to quicken recovery”, it would be a “waiting game” for many customers to have full access to their Marketo services restored.

“Bad records remained cached on many DNS servers around the world,” Thousandeyes said.

“As a result, many Marketo users may be completely unable to access Marketo services for as long as two days.”

Email campaigns continued to be sent while the domain was down. However, users were unable to login to check or alter planned campaigns.

This proved problematic when elements of the emails such as links were broken due to being hosted on a Marketo domain for analytics purposes, leading to a number of complaints on Marketo's social channels about being unable to stop broken campaigns.