A friend of mine noticed that there was no A record for samsung.com; it turns out there's no SOA, or any kind of record.<p>Their WHOIS shows an authoritative nameserver of "dns".
They've been tackling a fire in one of their buildings <a href="http://inagist.com/all/457783829101428736/" rel="nofollow">http://inagist.com/all/457783829101428736/</a>
It's of course a tragedy if their datacenter cought fire, but it's nevertheless bad engineering if a lot of their products seem to require access to "samsung.com" for a lot of unrelated tasks (as some other site mentioned: Netflix cannot be accessed if a certain XML file cannot be fetched from www.samsung.com).
They were gone for a while (couldn't even query their whois record) but they're back and everything seems fine now.<p>Interestingly, I could still shoot them an email (perhaps because the relevant records were cached by my nameserver). Hi, Samsung!
This is why I don't buy anything Samsung. If they can barely keep their company website in the air on an ordinary day, what's there to think of their actual products?<p>It's not just samsung.com, but their entire web presence...