Over this past weekend, every service Automatica runs on the automatica.com.au domain - email, our website, and our internal documentation platform - went offline for approximately 61 hours. Not because of a cyberattack, a misconfiguration, or an infrastructure failure. Because our domain registrar, GoDaddy, silently blocked an automatic renewal without telling us why, then asked us to prove our identity via an email address that was offline because of the block.
This post covers what happened, why it happened, and what we’re doing about it.
Background: How .com.au Registration Works
If you’re outside Australia or haven’t dealt with .com.au domain administration, some context is useful.
.com.au domains are administered under policy set by auDA (the .au Domain Administration), the regulatory body that governs the .au namespace. auDA sets eligibility rules for registering .com.au domains - among them, the requirement that the registrant be an Australian company, in which case their ACN (Australian Company Number) must be on record.
auDA does not operate as a retail entity. They do not sell domains, and they do not communicate directly with registrants. That responsibility sits entirely with the registrar - in this case, GoDaddy. If auDA requires information from a registrant, GoDaddy is the channel through which that requirement is communicated. There is no other mechanism.
This distinction matters a great deal for what follows.
What Happened
The automatica.com.au domain anniversary date was 12/06/2026. Auto-renew was enabled on the account, and a valid payment method was on file.
On 6th June - six days before the anniversary - GoDaddy sent an email stating the domain had already expired. It hadn’t. The email was factually incorrect. I logged into the GoDaddy console, confirmed auto-renew was enabled, checked the registrant details, and verified the payment method. Everything appeared in order. No action was flagged as required.
The domain lapsed on the 12th June. The last inbound email we received to an @automatica.com.au address was at 18:02 on Friday 12th June. From that point, email, the website, and our Hudu documentation instance were all unreachable.
The Weekend
On Saturday morning I called GoDaddy. After approximately an hour on the phone, I was told that auDA required additional registrant information - specifically the ACN for Automatica Pty Ltd - before the renewal could be processed. I had not been informed of this requirement at any prior point. Not when the renewal was held, not in the premature expiry email, not when I checked the console.
I was instructed to send an email with the business details. I did so, providing the ABN (I use it more frequently and had it to hand; the ACN wasn’t immediately recalled). GoDaddy indicated resolution within 24–48 hours following escalation.
By Sunday morning, nothing had changed. A follow-up call yielded no new information.
On Monday morning I discovered an email GoDaddy had sent at 01:30, requesting that I respond to confirm my identity - from either [email protected] or [email protected].
Both addresses were inaccessible because of the outage GoDaddy’s process had created.
The Resolution - and What It Revealed
When I checked the GoDaddy console on Monday morning, the option to renew both automatica.com.au and automatica.net.au was available. I renewed both immediately. Services were restored within 30 minutes as DNS propagated.
Following resolution, I ran a whois lookup. The registrant record showed:
Registrant: AUTOMATICA PTY LTD
Eligibility ID: ACN 137582935I then checked historical whois data. Records going back to at least 2015, more than a decade ago, show the same registrant name and the same ACN.
GoDaddy blocked the renewal citing a missing ACN. The ACN was already in the registrant record.
The Failure Points
To be clear about where things went wrong:
1. The renewal block was not communicated. GoDaddy held the auto-renewal without notifying us that it was being held or why. Auto-renew being enabled is a reasonable expectation that the renewal will proceed. If a compliance check fails, the registrant needs to know immediately - not after the domain has lapsed.
2. The 6 June email was misleading. An email stating a domain has expired, sent six days before the expiry date, is either an error or deeply unclear messaging. Either way, it prompted a console check that showed nothing wrong - because the actual problem (the pending compliance hold) was not surfaced anywhere in the UI.
3. The identity verification process was circular. GoDaddy’s request for confirmation required a reply from a domain-dependent email address. If the domain is down, those addresses are unreachable. This is not an edge case - it is a predictable consequence of the situation GoDaddy had created.
4. The information they required was already on record. Historical whois data confirms the ACN was present in the registrant record well before the renewal was due. Whether GoDaddy’s internal systems had become desynchronised from the registry data, or whether a process triggered incorrectly, the net effect was a 61-hour outage based on a requirement for information that was demonstrably already there.
What We’re Doing About It
We have initiated the transfer of all Automatica domain names from GoDaddy to Serversaurus, a Melbourne-based Australian registrar. The transfers are currently in progress.
The reasoning is straightforward: for .com.au domains, dealing with a registrar that is embedded in the Australian market and familiar with auDA’s requirements reduces the risk of this class of failure. An Australian registrar is also far easier to engage with when something goes wrong - time zone alignment and local regulatory knowledge matter when you’re troubleshooting a domain issue on a Saturday morning.
Advice for Other .au Domain Name Registrants
If you manage any .au domains, including .com.au domains, particularly on behalf of a company:
- Confirm your ACN is present in your registrant record. Run a whois lookup on your domain and verify the Eligibility ID field shows your ACN, not just an ABN. These are different identifiers - the ACN is the number issued by ASIC upon company registration and is format-constrained (nine digits).
- Don’t rely solely on auto-renew. Set a calendar reminder 30 days before your domain anniversary date and log into your registrar console to verify the renewal is queued and no holds are flagged.
- Maintain a non-domain-dependent contact method with your registrar. A personal email address, a mobile number, something that remains reachable if your domain-based addresses go down.
- Consider whether your registrar has local accountability. Large international registrars handle enormous volumes and their support processes are not always well-suited to the specifics of the
.com.aunamespace.
A Note on GoDaddy
We’re not writing GoDaddy off entirely as a registrar for all purposes, and we’re not suggesting this reflects universal bad practice. They handle millions of domains and the majority of renewals proceed without incident. But the combination of failures here - no communication of a compliance hold, a misleading pre-expiry email, a verification process that assumed working email, and a block based on information already on record - represents a serious gap in their handling of .com.au renewal compliance. That’s worth naming clearly.
Automatica provides specialised IT consulting and managed services for creative and professional services firms in Melbourne. If you have questions about domain management, registrar selection, or .com.au compliance, get in touch.