Aftermath: GoDaddy says sorry, now go buy something
On September 10, a massive outage took a noticeable chunk of the internet's websites offline when host and registrar GoDaddy went down and took millions of businesses with it for a few hours.
Apology emails to customers went out yesterday - with a bittersweet offer of a 30% discount and pitch for customers to give more of their money to the lumbering, domain-gobbling behemoth.
It's not like GoDaddy doesn't already offer 30% discounts every month on its products and services - oh wait, they do.
We had an outage, let us sell you something
Apparently different classes of customers received different apology emails and offers of compensation or goodwill.
Some customers were credited for a month of service on their active website. Many others got a sales pitch to buy more domains at a reduced rate, and told they could access a 30% discount on GoDaddy products and services.
According to the fine print, the 'apology sale' expires in seven days, does not apply to GoDaddy's premium domains, and is only valid on new products or renewals.
In emails written to customers yesterday, GoDaddy CEO Scott Wagner wrote,
We let you down and we know it. We take our responsibilities — and the trust you place in us — very seriously. (...)
As a result of this disruption, you will receive 30% off any new product or renewal.* This offer will be available to you for the next 7 days.
Services that GoDaddy's paying customers lost for several hours on Monday included their websites, emails and other services.
Bad Daddy, or the worst Daddy?
Upon receiving the email, SEO Whistleblower's Stephen Chapman remarked,
NOTHING would have been better than this attempt to make a sale.
Indeed.
Offering to sell customers new products after causing customers to lose money isn't exactly going over very well now that people are realizing that GoDaddy seems to be turning customer harm into a sales opportunity.
GoDaddy is the largest ICANN registrar, with over 30 million domains (32% of the market share).
While having the lion's share of registered domains on the internet, GoDaddy has arguably the darkest reputation.
When GoDaddy's DNS began to fail on Monday, forum talk on sites such as Reddit were quick to mention the company's more problematic reputation highlights which include once supporting SOPA/PIPA, its CEO shooting an elephant (an endangered animal) for sport, and inducting Danica Patrick (the most successful woman in American open-wheel racing) into its notorious "GoDaddy Girls" legacy of cheesecake T&A-heavy advertising.
But whether or not you agree with the reasons GoDaddy has cultural critics, it remains to be seen how effective a sales pitch apology is for customer relations.