Melbourne IT registrar plagued by service problems

The world's fifth largest web registrar, based in Melbourne, Australia, continues to be plagued by service problems on Wednesday that have affected 350,000 customers.
Melbourne IT customers, whose clients include Fortune 500 companies, were completely offline for 15 minutes on Tuesday as the company sought a temporary fix for the problem that has been ongoing since Jan. 14.
Investors on Australia's stock exchange moved away from the 108 million U.S. dollar company, with its share value dropping almost 10 percent in the past week.
The issue affected customers who were "in the process of, or have recently migrated to, our new infrastructure", the company said on its website.
Hundreds of thousands of customers are being migrated to NetRegistry's Console platform after Melbourne IT acquired the company in February for 45 million U.S. dollars.
The woes are not over for its customers who will endure another brief outage next week when a new piece of hardware is installed.
Melbourne IT confirmed late on Tuesday the interim fix had been successful and said the new piece of hardware it had since ordered would arrive on Monday.
Melbourne IT chief customer officer Brett Fenton said the latest service issue was "completely unrelated" to the customer migration.
He said the problem, as far as it was understood at 5.00 p.m. on Tuesday, was rooted in issues with firewall software.
Fenton reiterated comments from Melbourne IT chief executive Martin Mercer on Friday that Melbourne IT had suffered a "perfect storm" of issues, including email delays, that had overwhelmed its customer support channels.
CQR Information Security founder Phil Kernick suggested to Fairfax Media a lack of planning from Australia's largest web registrar contributed to the week-long issues.
"They didn't think things were going to go wrong," he said of the NetRegistry migration.