The recent outage of Guaranty Trust Bank’s (GTBank) website, which lasted from Tuesday night until early Thursday, has sparked speculation about its cause. While initial reports suggested a possible cybersecurity breach, the true reason behind the outage remains unclear.
Sources familiar with the situation have mentioned that the downtime could potentially be linked to a domain name registration issue. If accurate, a delay in renewing the bank’s domain name might have led to the site being temporarily inaccessible, possibly creating an opportunity for others to acquire the domain.
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This incident is reminiscent of previous domain lapses experienced by major companies. For example, MTN Nigeria encountered a similar problem in 2019 when its website was briefly inaccessible due to a domain issue. Microsoft also faced a domain lapse with hotmail.co.uk in 2003.
As of now, GTBank has not provided an official explanation, and some customers are still experiencing inconsistent access to the site. The ongoing issues may be related to DNS propagation delays or security features like HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which could affect site accessibility.
