As you can see our website is now back working again. This article explains what happened, why people didn't all see the same site, and how we fixed it.

First of all, I need to explain a little about the internet.

When you type icu.ie into a browser, your computer goes to a machine called the Domain Name Server and says "Excuse me, what is the IP address of icu.ie?", and most days it will respond with 176.58.112.239. Your browser then sends a request for a webpage to that IP address. This value can be changed by logging on to the registrar website, and updating the DNS records. When this happens the registrar updates their local domain name server, but that's not sufficient, as there are thousands of domain name servers across the internet, and changes take time to ripple out to all of the other domain name servers across the world. This process can take up to 2 days to complete, but within Ireland, it probably only takes a couple of hours. This is why people have seen different pages when they go to icu.ie, because they were connected to different DNS servers.

It's even more complicated in that some browsers, and some operating systems will use an old IP address they got for a specific domain name. They may end up using that address for one or two days before refreshing.

So what happened? During the domain name renewal process, it emerged that the handover to the new executive had not been fully completed and we temporarily lost control of our domain name account. While this was not ideal and we are taking steps to better manage this in future. In itself, it should not have led to loss of service to members. It was during this period the IP address was changed to an unauthorized site.

To regain control and restore the correct IP address, we were obliged to contact the registrar to prove that we are the legitimate owners of icu.ie. This process took about 2 days to complete, a day on our side to gather the necessary documentation, and a day on the registrar's side to verify it.

Note that throughout this time, we were in complete control of our web server and database containing membership details that was never under threat.