IIA Offline – Esat Billing Issues

The Irish Internet Association’s website has been offline for most of today.
Why?
Well put simply the domain has vanished from DNS, so it’s impossible for anyone to reach it.
The domain is held by Esat’s nameservers, but at some point in the last 24 hours someone removed it completely from their nameservers and as the IEDR’s offices are closed today there is no way to move the domain to another set of nameservers even as an interim measure (ie. there are no reloads or changes to the .ie zonefile today)
I spoke to the IIA’s CEO Fergal O’Byrne a short time ago and he explained what had happened.
It transpires that the IIA have a free account with Esat, but that their billing department seems to have raised an invoice 4 years ago for services. Although the invoice was flagged as free and to be removed it obviously wasn’t …
End result being the site is offline due to a billing error.
I’m sure Fergal is very impressed!