TL;DR Before transferring a new domain to a registrar, contact support, and make sure there are still live humans behind the robots. If there aren’t, RUN!!!

UPDATE
I’ve got my domain back, but it took a month. I waited for the ownership team for two weeks without result, and when I pinged them, they told me they were trying to find some contact information related to me in the archive copy of the web site. A rather pointless task, if you ask me. Fortunately, the web site contained an email of a person I know, so we were able to establish the ownership through that email. Interestingly, they did not mention this option in the beginning, they insisted on emails related to the domain, like admin@domain.com, which were obviously dead. Once my ownership was established, they “escalated it to the dev team”, and it took another week to actually give me access, but voila, I got it back.
END UPDATE

My two domains have been registered on arbordomains.com for over 20 years. Things went really smooth: every 2 years they took my money and renewed my registration. I even contacted support back in 2021, they responded, all good.

In August, I picked up a web site from an acquaintance, and decided to transfer that domain to my favorite registrar. It didn’t go well: the domain went dark, no DNS, no email, no nothing. Nobody was answering the support emails, and the phone number I found had a perpetual “busy” signal. arbordomains.com turned into a zombie: the robots continue to work and happily take money, but there are no humans to help in case of problems.

With most registrars, you add new domains to your existing account. With arbordomains, each domain is a separate account, with its own password. I have never got the credentials for the domain I transferred, so I can’t manage it. Arbordomains.com happily took my money, and sent me a link to the “contact info verification form”, which contained correct data. I clicked on the link, verified my data, and then received me two simultaneous notifications: that I passed the verification, and that the contact info was successfully changed. It remains unknown what it was changed to.

That was the last I heard of my domain: now it has no nameserver assigned, and therefore no DNS, no email, and no web site, and I have no password to fix it. To boot, the contact email is now either empty or unknown, but I can’t even see what it is, for “privacy reasons”.

I started searching who can I contact to resolve the situation. ICANN is basically useless: you can complain, but they won’t give you transfer codes, and won’t recover the domain for you. Luckily, it turned out that arbordomains.com was a reseller of enom.com, also known as “Tucows”. Contacting their support was not a picnic either: I wrote to sales with no response, wrote to some other place, and finally found the unresponsive reseller page buried in their web site. For that inquiry I did receive a response, it took a few rounds of back-and-forth to explain my situation, they took my info and the proofs of the domain ownership that I had, and said they will be escalating the case to the “ownership team”. It’s been over a week now, no word from the ownership team, and no answer to my question how much longer it may take.

The good news is that I was able to relatively painlessly transfer my two other domains out of arbordomains.com, because I had access to the domain management, and the contact information was correct. I asked around, and friends advised me to use porkbun.com registrar. I wrote to their support, made sure it is alive, and then asked enom support to give me the transfer codes. The entire process took a couple of days and was relatively painless. Enom said they can’t give me the transfer code to the “lost” domain in the same manner, because the contact information is invalid, and they have to wait for the ownership team to double check that I am the owner.

The bottom line is, registrars can die, just like people. Unlike people, they can continue to function on scripts, turning into zombies. They will take your money and even perform simple automated operations, but if something goes wrong, you are stuck, and you can lose your web site and access to your domain for unknown amount of time. Beware of the zombie registrars.