Rain Makers

GoDaddy Says Internal Network Events Caused Outage not DDoS Attack

September 11, 2012 , 0 Frank Gurnee

In a published statement on GoDaddy’s site, Interim CEO Scott Wagner provided a statement giving details about the September 10^th outage that lasted most of the day and affected millions of users, GoDaddy hosted websites, and Domains.

GoDaddy Statement:

Yesterday, GoDaddy.com and many of our customers experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT.

The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.

At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.

Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it.

We take our business and our customers’ businesses very seriously. We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience.

-       Scott Wagner Go Daddy Interim CEO

A hacker by the name of AnonymousOwn3R had immediately claimed responsibility for the outage and gained worldwide attention via twitter and media outlets. According to the released statement this was not an attack at all but a software issue that has been seen before from other web/software companies.

It is not yet clear what the impact of the event caused to web based businesses but the outage has had many questioning their ties to GoDaddy and it will be easy for competitors to swoop in and pick up upset customers. The event is sure to cost the company business and revenue though we have not heard of any refunds or future service discounts being given out as of yet.

As of last night, affected sites seem to be back up and the GoDaddy site is also up and back to business as usual.