Oakland city website down after failure to renew domain name

Failure to renew the domain for www.oaklandnet.com led to a downed website for the city of Oakland on Thursday. Failure to renew the domain for www.oaklandnet.com led to a downed website for the city of Oakland on Thursday. Image 1 of / 133 Caption Close Oakland city website down after failure to renew domain name 1 / 133 Back to Gallery

Even cities forget to renew their website domain names. Such is the case for the city of Oakland website, which was down much of the morning and afternoon Thursday.

Those navigating to oaklandnet.com were faced with a generic filler page advertising Network Solutions. The option to "renew now" was linked in the top right corner.

Spokeswoman Karen Boyd told the East Bay Times that the city had failed to renew its domain name, thus the snafu. Although the city promptly took action to restore the website, Boyd told the paper "it takes time to propagate."

Around 5 p.m., the City of Oakland Twitter account tweeted: "Trouble accessing our website? We're working on it. Oaklandnet.com will be back up a.sa.p. Thanks for your patience."

Umm...where did @Oakland's website go? Did they change the URL, or forget to renew the domain? #oakmtg pic.twitter.com/aG32yPDiRc — David Colburn (@davidcolburn) April 13, 2017

At time of writing, the homepage is back up and running, although some links still lead to the placeholder page.

Oaklandnet.com is an interesting url for a city website. San Francisco uses the more succinct sfgov.org, while San Jose employs sanjoseca.gov. Oakland officials have yet to respond to SFGATE's inquiries regarding the unconventional url.

City officials and services can be accessed by phone at (510) 444-3254.

Read Michelle Robertson’s latest stories and send her news tips at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com.