Go Daddy claims internal problems, not an attack, took it down
Go Daddy, the popular and controversial Web domain and service company, which crashed and burned, along with millions of it customers on September 10th, is now claiming that it wasn't taken down by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, but by “a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.”
Scott Wagner Go Daddy Interim CEO, the company stated:
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.
A Twitter user, called @AnonymousOwn3r, had claimed sole responsibility for the alleged attack, saying, "was only me not the Anonymous [collective]". On his Twitter profile, he claims to be a "security leader of #Anonymous." He goes on to say in an earlier tweet that he was "behind many things such like irc, ops, attacks [sic]."
However, one of the 'main' Anonymous account, @YourAnonNews, has distanced the hacking collective from the alleged attack, saying in a tweet: "Please redirect your godaddy hate to @AnonymousOwn3r says is the 'leader' of Anonymous."
The attack, unlike most DDoS attacks had taken down not just Go Daddy-hosted Web sites, but Go Daddy's Domain Name System (DNS) services as well. For a time, Go Daddy moved its DNS record to rival domain services provider VeriSign.
It seems likely that Go Daddy's explanation is correct. There were no signs of a major DDoS attack from companies such as Arbor Networks and Akamai that monitor Internet attacks.
In addition, as Andrew Allemann, editor of Domain Name Wire, noted earlier today, "incredible how [it was taken] as fact what a single twitter user said about yesterday’s #GoDaddy attack. ”
Wager closed his statement with “We take our business and our customers' businesses very seriously. We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience.” Whether Go Daddy's tens of millions of customers will accept this apology remains to be seen.
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