co.za is the most popular Second Level Domain (SLD) inSouth Africa with over 500 000 registrations. Uniforum SA is theorganisation responsible for managing this SLD.

Currently co.za registrations and updates are processed via textemails. Once the form is completed it is emailed to the registrywho generates a ticket that is sent to each Whois contact toaccept. If at least one contact accepts the update will beconfirmed approximately 24 hours later. If one contact denies theticket the update is rejected.

The problem with this process is that it takes 1 day to effect anychanges to a co.za domain name, which includes changes tonameservers. On Sunday 4 April 2010 co.za went down which meant noregistrations, renewals or updates could be processed. To makematters worse it has taken over 5 days to fix the issue and stilldomain name renewals cannot be processed.

We believe this issue highlights the need to reassess the systemsused to manage the co.za extension. Hopefully .zadna (www.zadna.org.za) will speed up thereform of co.za to bring it in-line with other country code TopLevel Domains.