The registrar has taken the domain out of the DNS.
The registry must not publish the domain’s delegation, so the domain stops resolving everywhere once caches expire. Registrars use it for non-payment, unverified registrant contact details, abuse complaints or legal disputes.
- EPP code
- clientHold
- In RDAP
- client hold
- Set by
- Your registrar (client status)
- Defined in
- RFC 5731 §2.3
- How serious
- Act now
Why it matters
Website and email both stop. Mail to the domain bounces or queues, and mail from it fails SPF and DMARC because receivers can’t find the records.
When you’d see it
A common trigger in gTLDs is an unanswered registrant email verification: the registrar suspends the domain until the address is confirmed. Another is an unpaid renewal. Either way the site and mail go dark at once, which is why it shows up as an outage first.
How it shows up in a lookup
In a gTLD WHOIS lookup it appears as “Domain Status: clientHold https://icann.org/epp#clientHold”; RDAP shows it as “client hold”. It is a client status, so only your registrar can add or remove it; the registry enforces it.
What to do
Contact your registrar. Common fixes are paying an overdue renewal or confirming the registrant email address they sent a verification to.
Related codes
Sources
Sources
- RFC 5731 §2.3 (EPP Domain Name Mapping) · checked 5 Oct 2026
- ICANN: EPP Status Codes, What do they mean, and why should I know? · checked 5 Oct 2026
- RFC 8056: EPP and RDAP status mapping · checked 5 Oct 2026