Go Daddy denies hack, blames internal problems for outage

Joshua Lott - Web hosting company GoDaddy denied that a Monday outage was the result of a cyber attack. The site is the largest Web registrar in the world and is known for its suggestive commercials. Ads starring driver Danica Patrick, which feature her unzipping her racing suit and stepping into a shower, have drawn criticism for being too racy.

•   Text Size
• Print
• E-mail
• Reprints

By Hayley Tsukayama, Published: September 11

Go Daddy, the world’s largest registrar of domain names, denied Tuesday that an hours-long outage at the company Monday was caused by a hack or denial of service attack. Instead, the company said, its own internal systems — not an attack — were to blame.

A person claiming to be a lead hacker within the Anonymous hacking collective had taken credit for bringing the site’s severs down. Under the Twitter handle “AnonymousOwn3r,”the person continued even after Go Daddy’s denial to say that he or she had attacked the site.

But according to Go Daddy, the company’s analysis shows there was no outside action.

“The service outage was not caused by external influences,” the company’s interim chief executive Scott Wagner said in a statement sent to press. “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.”

Wagner said that no personal or financial data was vulnerable during the outage.

The disruption Monday took down the Web sites of many of its customers. Small businesses were particularly hard hit by the outage, the Christian Science Monitorreported, and some business owners took to social networking sites to share their frustration over losing their Web sites for much of the business day.

The long outage was a reminder that much of the Web relies on a single company for hosting.

In the statement, Wagner said that the company had “let its customers down and we know it.”

“We take our business and our customers' businesses very seriously,” he added. “We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience.”

Last week, hackers identifying as a part of Anonymous also posted information on Apple unique device IDs that they claimed to have stolen from the FBI. The FBI denied the attack, and a publishing company, BlueToad, stepped forward Monday and identified itself as the source of the data the hackers posted
.