Aimchess.com down

Hi Martin,

It's been 2 days since the last update and the aimchess website and app are still down.

yes ik same

In the US it's still today, though I don't know if there's going to be something posted for sure

Due to what appears the issue was, it takes time for the update made to propagate.

Yet another huge hiccup for Chess.com management. It's was similar experience with the slow death of chess24.com. They promised the return of subscription fees to the users that got burned. Nothing happened. And no support whatsoever 6 month prior! No communication. Paid subscribers left in the dust. This does not bode well for development of online chess by chess.com.

Can anyone recommend an alternative service to AimChess?
Happy to pay for it, a subscription just opened up in my budget.

Offline for a week, no comms, no attempt at comms.

A domain dns issue takes <24hrs to propogate. Not a week.

A code repair is hours not days, propgates just as quickly unless you mailed it in.

so more likely an unplanned event - perhaps an upgrade gone wrong, a core solution product issue ( as in licenced IP from third party being discontinued ), or a cyber breach….. or maybe they just dont give a wassname.

Come clean. Major Incident Management has to be a core competency - and comms are the critical factor.

definitely poor incident management and comms to the customer base.

No, certain domain issues can take longer. My understanding is the site still works via IP so it's related to the domain name .

I can confirm, I've been using it for 2 days now via direct IP connection. it's DNS / domain name issue for sure.

is there a way to access it via ios?

It's not as clear cut as that. Under certain circumstances the DNS and domain name can take longer and once rectified by the site has to wait on the back-end processes to complete.

Again, there are certain instances where the change takes longer and once it happens the site is also in a waiting game

Hi Folks! Daniel from Aimchess here!
We've just posted a public statement on Facebook, but I wanted to jump in here and alleviate some of your specific concerns as well!

As some of you have speculated, we are indeed having DNS issues and we're working to resolve it. Unfortunately it's not as simple as a missed payment, and we've been working with GoDaddy to get a resolution to the issue as soon as possible. From our end we've done all we can, and the ball is in their court for now.

We would like to sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused, particularly for our premium users who have paid for a service they haven't received in the last few days. We'd like to assure you, that we're already working behind the scenes on compensatory action to issue when we're back online, and we're truly grateful for your patience with this issue.

As a side effect of the issue, we're unable to receive emails at the moment, so we would ask that you redirect urgent support issues to https://www.chess.com/support

I do appreciate the fact that you are here and posting now, but bluntly, almost a week down before we hear anything about a paid service being disrupted is underwhelming at best.

To baldydd: Thank you so much for the explanation. As a web programmer, I know that nothing is ever straightforward and nothing is ever simple. Communication was a problem. In the future, is there any way to redirect the Aimchess link in the Chess.com side menu to a message page on the Chess.com site? That would go a long way to avoid all the negativity and not leave customers hanging.

I visited Aimchess from the "Learn" sidebar item here at chess.com and it started working again. [Correction: It was more due to the edited hosts file like described above]

Thank you, baldydd, for your message and to Aimchess for releasing the statement on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/B5sdbwjfyZhAfsDP/

Thanks for the explanation. As a programmer, I would like to offer a quick solution to address app access issues. I believe your app relies on a domain to access all its content. Therefore, I suggest that Aimchess purchase a new domain (or even better, use aimchess.chess.com/ the subdomain) and redirect all app traffic to this new domain. You can then release an updated version of the app with the new redirected domain. This way, you won't have to wait for GoDaddy to resolve the issue.

Feels like whomever purchased the domain, the account at godaddy who actually registered it, is not available to the current operator - hence the issues in sorting DNS or Registration renewal even ?

DNS is not run by GoDaddy. All they would have is the registered DNS types and they then upload those to the great internet services in the sky…..

Still, just going to have to wait until its sorted…..

That would require the app to be updated and would only work for people that had that URL on a full browser or the new version of the app. Then it would need an update again after everything is resolved (unless the alternative was used as a fall back mechanism)