The Supernews site and news servers were inaccessible today. We’re now able to connect but some may still be having issues. It appears the outage was related to a DNS issue. Though we’re not certain as unfortunately Supernews doesn’t update their site with status updates after problems. This is the second reported site outage for Supernews in the past few months. In May all the Giganews services were down for a short time.
Not to knock Supernews as the service is typically reliable. We prefer some other Usenet providers (UseNetServer, Newshosting, Astraweb, Easynews, NewsDemon) but regardless I don’t think Supernews subscribers should panic or seek alternatives based on this incident. As quite frankly shit happens. We would just appreciate more communication on the part of Supernews so that members can understand the reasons behind the issues. For now if you’re still having trouble we have some advice.
You can sidestep DNS issues (assuming the problem is DNS related) by connecting to Supernews (or any other site with DNS problems) by using the IP address. In this case the IP address for Supernews news server is 216.168.3.30. In other words replace news.supernews.com in your newsreader with 216.168.3.30
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