Correction: According to a China Daily report, the China International Network Information Center (CNNIC) are now denying their told Beijing News that 10,000 .com domain names were lost by Chinese Internet users. Read this story for more information.

The rest of the original story is as follows:

The earthquake cut undersea telecommunications cables, disrupting Internet access across the Asian region, with services restored often only at slow speeds when services were re-routed.

The China International Network Information Center announced that the 10,000 Chinese .com owners had lost access to the domain names which were snapped up by other companies or spam website companies.

Some kind of compensation scheme is being discussed, but as the earthquake was ‘an act of God’, there’s no guarantee affected Chinese .com domain name owners really have any recourse.

Full service is set to be restored on January 15, but this will be no consolation to the 10,000 affected.

The lesson here?

Don’t wait until the last minute to renew your domain name, and certainly don’ t wait until after it has expired, safe in the knowledge that there is a set period of time available to you before it truly is available for others to register thanks to your non-action.

If your web address is important, make sure it’s promptly registered and this will never happen to you, acts of God notwithstanding. 
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