Kaskus, Indonesia’s biggest online community has been suffering from technical problem that prevents users to view their site for the past week or so. The problem was identified as issues related to Kaskus’ DNS and domain services.
Kaskus then made a sudden announcements and offline campaigns that they are rebranding from Kaskus.us to Kaskus.com, a surprise for most of their users. Kaskus invests in radio ads to help their users know about the changes although a quick search on Twitter reveals a lot of pissed and angry users demanding Kaskus to fix the problem.
The abrupt changes didn’t go smoothly as planned as the Kaskus.com domain now redirects to Google’s website, leaving their users puzzled and restless. The only way to access Kaskus’ website is now via their Kaskus.co.id domain, which most users are not familiar with and will definitely impact their advertising business.
This sudden changes also leaves millions of Kaskus pages on Google’s index dead with no information whatsoever. And it’s almost certain that Google will penalize them for coming up with empty pages indexed on the search engine.
A simple analysis shows that Kaskus’ DNS record for their .us domain is gone, their .com domain is hidden, and a trace route analysis to their .co.id domain is somewhat unstable.
We have reached Kaskus for comments on the matter but haven’t receive any feedback. Until now, Kaskus has not resolve the issue with their domains and until they do, they will lose a lot of money from their advertising business.
update with statement from Kaskus CFO
“Our .us DNS issue is out of our control, but this makes it a perfect opportunity for Kaskus to fully focused our traffic to Indonesia with our .co.id domain name. Pure Indonesian!” – Rene Adhibrata, CFO Kaskus
Disclosure: DailySocial and Kaskus are under one company.
update : Kaskus.com now redirects to Kaskus.co.id
