Squarespace Accidentally Borked Its Own Website

Whaaat just happened to Squarespace? In today’s daily dose of irony, the website hosting provider (known for supporting site operations for companies the world over) seemed to temporarily lose access to its own homepage Tuesday.

A little before 1 p.m. ET, online users began noticing problems, finding only a banner that read either “Website Expired” or “Site Deleted” when they visited the site. One web user archived an image of this on the Wayback Machine, for posterity.

Onlookers alternately mused over whether the page had been hacked, deleted, or if the company had forgotten to pay their own Squarespace “bill.” Others figured: early April Fool’s Day joke? All interesting theories, though the company hasn’t really given enough details about what happened to vindicate any of them:

People were amused:

Early on, the company did its best to respond to the confused masses—offering that their engineers were “looking into” the matter.

Later on, the company characterized the problem as the result of a “minor outage,” but didn’t elaborate on what that meant.

About an hour after the problem initially popped up, around 1:23 p.m. ET, the company’s homepage came back online and the issue was declared “resolved.”

When reached by email Tuesday, a Squarespace spokesperson shed little light on the subject, telling Gizmodo the following: “An internal process error caused a temporary issue with our front site. The issue and process have been fully resolved. There was no malicious activity involved and the issue did not impact any customer websites.”

Weird! Were it Thursday, I might have gone with the April’s Fool’s Day interpretation. A “minor outage” that causes a company’s homepage to first display that it had been “deleted,” then that it had “expired”? I guess stranger things have happened. Did someone accidentally click the CMS “delete” button? We’ll update this post when we know more.