Glitch knocks Rollingstone.com offline

IDG News Service - Rollingstone.com stopped rolling for several hours on Monday.

The music Web site was knocked offline, apparently after a DNS configuration error caused site visitors to be greeted with a Network Solutions "This page is under construction" page instead of articles on Eric Clapton or Ke$ha.

The issue, first reported by Mashable, was apparently due to a glitch on Rolling Stone's part, according to Susan Wade, a spokeswoman with Rolling Stone's domain name registrar, Network Solutions.

Wade didn't know what the specific problem was, but Network Solutions displays the "under construction" page when a registered domain name does not resolve to a working Web server.

Mashable speculated that Rolling Stone may have simply failed to renew the domain name, but Wade said that wasn't the case. "Their domain is fine," she said. "It is good through September of 2011."

Rolling Stone had fixed the problem by Monday afternoon, Wade said. However, the site was still not coming up for some visitors as of 1:20 p.m. Pacific time.

Domain name problems have caused a number of high-profile crashes recently. In the past few months, Twitter and China's Baidu.com were both taken down after hackers changed their DNS records, redirecting Web visitors to different servers. There is no evidence that Rollingstone.com was hacked, however.

Rolling Stone representatives did not immediately return messages asking for comment.

Rollingstone.com is the 1057th-most-popular Web site in the U.S., according to Web traffic monitoring service Alexa.