.org whois server changes from PIR

I am using Watch My Domains ISP to manage my domain names. This is a great tool for all domainers and I highly recommend it. I was using it checking whois for about 500 of my domains yesterday when I realized that wasn’t getting whois details for my .org domain names. I was getting an ERROR message.

I then remembered that the Public Registry Interest (PIR), the .org registry, run scheduled maintenance on Saturday. All PIR whois servers were down.

I have been using whois.publicinterestregistry.net as my .org whois server for many years and never had a problem with it other that the whois limit that PIR introduced back in 2005.

I tested all the .org whois servers I know and this is what I found:

whois.publicinterestregistry.net (not working)
whois.publicinterestregistry.org (not working giving out this message: Whois Lookup Error: Whois server is currently not reachable.)
whois.publicinterestregistry.com (working)
whois.publicinterestregistry.biz (working)
whois.publicinterestregistry.info (working)
whois.pir.org (working)

So it seems that the whois.publicinterestregistry.net and whois.publicinterestregistry.org redirections to the main whois server were deactivated on Saturday. This seems a bit strange to me as the .com, .biz and .info versions are still working.

I decided to go with whois.pir.org as my preferred whois server with Watch My Domains. It seems to be working perfectly so far.

BTW Afilias Limited is PIR’s chosen back-end service for the .org gTLD. That is the reason that all the “publicinterestregistry” domains are owned by Afilias.