GoDaddy Denies All External Influence In Crash
Yesterday it became apparent late in the day that GoDaddy was having issues with keeping a collection of webpages up as they were reported as under attack by hackers – today it seems that this is entirely untrue. Though GoDaddy and collection of webpages they work with did indeed go down for a period yesterday, they've today sent out a statement that notes that no external forces had to do with the incident. Instead of it being Anonymous or some other nameless hacker dropping a DDoS attack or any number of other malicious actions, it was simply an internal network issue.
GoDaddy's interim CEO Scott Wagner has sent a message out to a set of webpages affected by the drop, including TechCrunch, which noted that, "once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions for our customers and GoDaddy.com." In addition, a site outage investigation report was released today with a bit more info:
"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."
- Wagner
This type of attack – or issue – is enough to make some of the more gigantic hosted webpages think about their future with the business. Because of a downtime like this, massive amounts of otherwise earned cash will have been lost. A company whose main task is to keep webpages hosted successfully on the web at all hours of the day has this one key element that will act as bad PR for them – what GoDaddy must hope now is that this incident fades away quickly.