360Search's New So.com Down in China, DNS Issues to Blame?

Just hours after it was announced, 360 Search's new domain so.com is down for many users in China. The outage was confirmed in a Weibo post by 360 Search's official account, which asks that users wait until tomorrow to access so.com because the URL may not have propagated to all domain name servers yet. It can take as long as 72 hours for a new URL to spread its way across the internet's domain name servers, but if that's really what's going on here, you have to wonder why Qihoo would choose to announce its new domain before it had time to propagate. Perhaps the company was just too excited to contain itself -- the two-letter URL did apparently cost "millions" after all -- but the blunder is a bit of an embarrassment for the young search engine, which already faces a stiff challenge from incumbent Baidu. (Baidu.com is still working fine; we checked.) Qihoo 360 is still swinging at Baidu; just hours before the so.com outage the company was using its official weibo account to rebut what it calls erroneous reports about the privacy issues with its new thumbs-up service and attack Baidu for 'selling fake products.' [via Zhou Hongyi's Weibo Account]