Relief for webs.com users

Uproar of happy voices was heard this afternoon as the webs.com websites finally came back to life.  Answers are still a bit sketchy on why the websites were actually down in the first place.  However the company marked the problem as solved within the forum. (http://support.webs.com)

“Apparently AT&T blocked username.webs.com due to it mimicking their login window. In other words a phishing site. The site was created - 2011-01-14 06:38:01.0 The site was reported to our abuse team and by AT&T Fri Jan 14 11:21:24 EST 2011 to our abuse team. Our abuse team froze the site - Fri Jan 14 13:02:05 EST 2011. Meaning the site was immediately no longer accessible. ATT was notified during this time of action taken. Additionally, I sent an email to their security team on 1/15/2011, which was posted in my updates.

Unfortunately, there was a break in communication within AT&T's internal departments/ This delayed knowledge of the action taken by Webs.com. Also, their Tier 1 team can not handle blockage issues and are trained to state no site is blocked regardless of the evidence. This is what I was told by several managers.

Thanks to you guys, the continual publicizing of the issue and our push on the back-end resulted in the blockage being removed. “

Cheers,
CT
Webs Management

The company continues to ensure its users that an incident such as this one is unlikely to occur again.  The company has plans to once again change their websites hosting name from webs.com to possibly prowebs.com as a safety measure.  Some are still skeptical however.  It sounds very similar to the situation the company had back in 2009 in which they opted to change their users name from freewebs.com to simply webs.com. 

It is a happy ending for most after a long 5 day black out which affected many small business owners and non-profit organizations.  Their websites are back up and visible to the general public. Some users such as myself, have opted to conduct their business elsewhere. 

In any event there is a harsh lesson to be learned here.  When conducting any kind of business online and/or other.  Extensive research into the company operations is essential.  Being a well informed as a consumer will protect you from this sort of disaster.