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The web-hosting guru GoDaddy had an outage September 10, 2012 that affected millions of domains worldwide. Initially, news reports concluded that the GoDaddy outage was from a hacker, but GoDaddy was quick to defend them.
The Complaint
September 10th millions of registered domains through the GoDaddy web system went black. Users were unable to access their email servers, webpages and anything else associated with their hosting through GoDaddy. As more members complained, the buzz quickly built up that GoDaddy must have been hacked. Why else would the leading provider of web hosting go down?
Twitter streams were flooded with posts regarding the GoDaddy “hack” and outages. GoDaddy did not help their case when they released a statement saying “We’re aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We’re working on it.”
A user on Twitter by the name of Anonymous Own3r claimed to be the leader of a hacker initiative that broke down GoDaddy and turned the servers offline. Though GoDaddy claims the outage was not hacker-related, they have yet to announce as to whether or not these statements are true or false.
GoDaddy’s Response
In response to the panic about a potential hacking situation, GoDaddy responded with a press release stating that the outage had nothing to do with outside influences. Instead, GoDaddy officials state that the outage occurred because of a series of poorly operating internal networks that eventually corrupted themselves and created data issues.
The outage did not even last 24 hours. By night most sites and hosting services were back up and running. GoDaddy assures all of their customers that their data was not compromised in any way, but some users are not convinced.
The biggest issue with the outage was that it was not just hosting that was down. Companies who register their domain through GoDaddy, but host their site elsewhere still found themselves without access to their own website, which means that when a user has a GoDaddy DNS, they cannot access it if GoDaddy is down.