Registration and hosting giant, GoDaddy, and its customers spent the better part of the working day on Monday in crisis mode. Both website and email accounts hosted by GoDaddy were offline for several hours. Although GoDaddy has no official comment as to the cause of the service disruption, self-proclaimed members of the hacker group, Anonymous, claim responsibility. One member in particular would like to take full credit for themselves. Judging by twitter traffic yesterday, the main sources of Anonymous information would like to distance themselves from the hack.
Whether or not Anonymous will take official credit for the massive service disruptions, customers world-wide suffered downtime and lost business.
Customer reactions ran high yesterday in commentary on twitter and on various blog posts about the outage. The comment thread on an article posted on TheNextWeb.com even included calls for a class action lawsuit against GoDaddy for the loss of business for the day. More reasoned users were openly discussing their options for moving their business away from the GoDaddy servers and calling for a criminal investigation into the hacker claims.
Considering the scale of the breakdown in service, GoDaddy was successful in restoring service as quickly as possible to its customers. The question will be, was it enough? How much of the fallout will GoDaddy have to clean up? How much of it can GoDaddy blame on an outside hack attack? And, how much responsibility will individual customers have to take on to secure their online businesses? GoDaddy has an opportunity to either earn some much needed good-will capital or continue to be vilified by many in the Internet community.
UPDATE:
Interim CEO of GoDaddy, Scott Wagner denies hacker claim.
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. – From Official GoDaddy Press Release
Does this make you feel more confident about the service GoDaddy.com provides it’s customers?
