Origins returns after a weekend AWOL

Having been offline for part or all of the weekend, Origins.net has been restored. I was notified of its disappearance by a concerned customer based in Canada who had been researching on the Irish Origins databases last Thursday but found it inaccessible on Saturday and Sunday.

An email she sent to the company also bounced back.

When I tried to raise the site yesterday, my search engine returned one of those 'This domain doesn't exist' cards. This suggests to me that there was a server failure.

Origins was bought by FindMyPast last year and its databases are in the process of moving to the latter. A note on the Origins site explains this and says the site will close down in early 2015. I don't know exactly when that will be, but it looks like 'early' doesn't mean this week!