Here is the official statement from Tucows/Enom

https://www.enom.com/enom-migration-2022/

Even though they downplay how this affected their customers in that article, this is the part that applies to our service: "Alongside this issue, a bug in the new DNS provisioning system resulted in incomplete DNS records for up to 350,000 domains. "

That number is far more than the "few hundred" they claimed when this was going on.

ILJ Mail is planning some upgrades in the next couple of months and will be using this experience to make some changes so that this particular type of problem doesn't affect us in the future.

What Happened:

On January 15 - 17, 2022, email messages for our domains were not able to reach our servers due to issues beyond our control caused by our domain registrar and DNS provider, Enom.

Who is Enom?

Enom is a domain registrar (where you go to purchase a domain name such as "ilj.com" for your website ) and a DNS provider (DNS tells the visitors where your website resides when they type in your domain name).

What did Enom do?

On January 15, 2022, Enom was doing some "maintenance" that they said would cause no issues or downtime for any of their customers. Instead, it caused domains to go down including our email domains. This was something that they did not expect and they started extending their maintenance every three hours or so as they tried to find the problem.

What happened to my email?

Some email coming from outside our servers to our domains was bouncing back as undeliverable. Most email providers will try to keep delivering email for a couple of days but some could have bounced back without the retry and your senders will need to re-send the message to you.

This was not an issue with our service. It was an issue upstream of us at our domain registrar and it did not only affect our company, but hundreds of other companies as well, including some government websites and many schools.

Outside Articles About The Issue

Here are some other articles that have been written about it: (we are not responsible for the content or language at these other websites so click at your own risk)

Entire Areas of the Internet Knocked Offline by Enom Following “Routine Maintenance”

Web hoster eNom suffering DNS issues after data center migration

Nightmare downtime weekend for some eNom and Google customers

eNom data center migration mistakenly knocks sites offline

We have had our domains at Enom for many years and have never had any kind of issues like this so it's definitely a rare chance that something like this would happen. We just happened to get caught in the crossfire of this one. Unfortunately, since they are our registrar, we were unable to move our domains to a new DNS provider and have to wait.

Updates from Enom.

January 17, 2022 12:45 p.m. Central (this one is not completely truthful... our domains are still being forwarded to the wrong website but at least our emails are working)