A few people, including Amy Welborn have been unable to access the Catholic World News site for past day or two. I’ve checked with our IT guys and they said they changed an internal configuration and now all of the Domain Name Servers on the Net need to catch up. (DNS is what translates the words “cwnews.com” into the numeric IP address “65.163.5.5” that computers understand. A series of computers around the Internet keep a database to match up names and addresses.)
This should clear up over the next 24 or 48 hours, but if you are one of the unlucky ones who can’t access the site yet because your Internet provider is slow at updating his DNS tables, you can try accessing it atthis link.
There is also the possibility that the problem is related to browser cookies being corrupted. In fact, I would try this first. Try deleting all cookies in your web browser related to “cwnews.com” or “www.cwnews.com” (you’ll probably have a set of both) and the try accessing the site via the alphabetic domain name. If it works, just log in again using your username and password and it should work fine.
Tell your IT guys they should have lowered the TTL on the DNS setting so that this would not have happened.
(TTL is “Time to Live”, which is what determines how long a DNS record will be cached in the various master DNS servers around the internet. The default is usually 24 to 48 hours. Setting it to something like 1 minute allows changes to the DNS record to propagate immediately).