Official Merger Website for Vodafone and Three UK Vanishes UPDATE3

The official website that was setup last year to support the proposed mobile mega-merger between Vodafone and Three UK – https://vodafoneandthree.uk – mysteriously vanished at the start of this week and has yet to return after several days of waiting. But the issue is more likely to be an awkward technical one than a sign of something more dramatic, we think.

Generally speaking, you wouldn’t normally expect the main website for one of the UK’s largest telecoms mergers to simply vanish for a week; that’s a bit on the unusual side. We first spotted the issue on Monday, but initially ignored it, as websites often suffer occasional disruption and such things are usually resolved within a few short hours or 1-2 days.

By Tuesday, we noticed that the website was still offline and the registration status of the domain on some whois checkers was listed as ‘Suspended‘ (example), while Nominet’s lookup (here) noted that “the Registry has configured the domain to not function in the DNS by setting ‘server hold’.” But issues with Domain Name System (DNS) assignments don’t usually take a full week to fix.

All of this prompted ISPreview to ask one of the operator’s PR contacts for an update, at which point we were informed, still on Tuesday morning, that it was “just a temporary issue“. Fast-forward three more days and it’s still offline, but will hopefully return soon (we have today asked for a bit more detail and an update). The issue follows shortly after both operators set out several commitments that they hope will enable the competition watchdog to give their deal the green light (here). But the outcome remains uncertain.

UPDATE 11:43am

Good news, it’s back online.

UPDATE 11:47am

Several of our readers have noted that the https://vodafoneandthree.uk website has been flagged by various online virus and malware scanners for security concerns (phishing and malware content), which might help to explain why it’s been offline (probably needed to check and clean). See the VirusTotal test below.

UPDATE 4:58pm

A spokesperson for Vodafone told ISPreview: “We’re aware there has been a technical issue with the site, which we’re working on and hope to have it resolved soon.”