Contrary to initial reports suggesting a cybersecurity attack, the recent outage of Guaranty Trust Bank’s website was likely caused by a domain name system configuration problem.
The bank’s website was inaccessible from Tuesday night until early Thursday as IT teams worked to resolve the issue.
“They had issues with their domain name registration and had to make changes or move it to a different domain name service,” said a Chief Technology Officer at a major Nigerian fintech company told TechCabal.
This suggests GTBank may have failed to renew its domain name ownership, potentially allowing opportunistic buyers to acquire the domain in hopes of reselling it at a premium.
A web developer explained that if GTBank has patented its website name, they can report the issue to the domain host and retrieve the site through established processes, though this may take time.
Domain name renewal oversights are not uncommon in the tech world.
In 2015, Google briefly lost ownership of “google.com” when it missed a renewal deadline. Similarly, Microsoft forgot to renew “hotmail.co.uk” in 2003.
Experts speculate that the lapse could be due to personnel changes or bureaucratic delays in vendor payments at GTBank.
As of publication, some customers reported being able to access the GTBank website while others still faced difficulties.
This inconsistency may be attributed to DNS propagation delays or security features like HTTP Strict Transport Security used by banks to protect customer information.
