[Update: Seems like both the city's main and mirror sites are up: More info on the cause of the disappearance when we get it]

Anyone know a good web hosting company? Looks like the City of Austin may need one. Their website is down, and no-one seems to know exactly why.

Anyone visiting the standard www.ci.austin.tx.us URL gets the following message: "You have arrived at this site because the US Locality domain you are searching for has been given back to Neustar Registry to manage."

The city's initial response to this situation is that there is a technical problem, and that people should visit www.austintx.gov instead. Unfortunately, that does not seem to be working either. If you can get to it (which is not a sure thing) then what you get is a garbled mess because 1: all the links are to pages on the ci.austin.tx.us site and 2: all the images are stored on the main site as well. So no working links, no images.

Who knew you could get a fail whale this far inland?