UPDATE: It appears that the Gimp website registration expired and so the DNS resolution was automatically “parked” by the registrar. Once they were aware of this, the Gimp site admins re-registered the site for another 5 years, then the site was pointed back to the original content servers, but there was a lag in DNS resolution due to the ttl on different servers around the internet for a few more hours.

Popular open source image editing software GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is currently experience an outage of their entire domain. It appears that their registration may have expired without being renewed. Hopefully this is simply an oversight, and the problem will be corrected soon.

Gimp serves as a free open source alternative to the industry standard image editing software published by Adobe photoshop. While Gimp may have lagged behind it’s biggest rival Photoshop in certain features, it provides a great platform for those who dabble in image editing but are not willing or able to pay the hefty fees of the alternatives.

If only Gimp.org had signed up for a service like Dotcom-Monitor that monitored websites and sends alert notifications to the site hosts as soon as an outage was detected.

While this may simply be an inconvenience for new users trying to download the free software, such an issue for most for-profit businesses could lead to a loss of thousands or even millions of dollars in business.

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