Dawn is one of the oldest and widely read English newspaper in Pakistan. The official website of the newspaper Dawn.com is currently showing a parked page.
The first thing comes to mind after watching the defaced homepage is that the website may have been compromised and hackers have taken control as it was hacked by Indians back in 2011 but Dawn staff ruled out the possibility of hacking and via its twitter account announced that website is currently facing some technical difficulties and its not hacked.
@dawn_com No sir, it’s not hacked.
— Dawn Media Group (@dawn_com) June 20, 2013
Looking at the whois records of Dawn.com the website is owned by Pakistan Herald Publications Limited registered through Network Solutions, using a nginx server hosted by WordPress and located in USA. The recent Domain name servers modification was done today. So the problem may be linked to the name servers or the hosting account as someone entered the wrong info there.
Dawn.com is one the very popular websites in Pakistan having an Alexa traffic rank of 71 in Pakistan, viewed by thousands of users daily. Media outlets like Dawn should try to avoid such incidents as thousands of visitors are now viewing the parked page. If its not a hacking attack and only some fault with DNS even then it would take approximately 48 hours for DNS propagation, so you may not see the website online for a couple of days.
Update (21.06.13 12:10PM): The website is back online.
