The CEO of Go Daddy said Tuesday internal issues, not a denial of service attack, left millions of hosted sites offline for several hours yesterday.
In a statement, interim chief executive Scott Wagner said an internal investigation into the outage concluded no outside attack took place.
“The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a ‘hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS),” he said. “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 added that customer data was never at risk.
After the massive outage, those using the Twitter accounts @AnonymousOwn3r and @AnonOpsLegion claimed responsibility for taking down GoDaddy’s system. Various news reports linked the outage to an attack by members of the hacker collective Anonymous. But another Twitter account tied to Anonymous, @AnonyOps, suggested the group wasn’t responsible for Monday’s attack.
“Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure,” Wagner said. “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.”
One CEO of an online shoe store called the service disruption “devastating” and told United Press International his company lost as much as $50,000 in sales during the earlier outage. “It feels to me that a company of that size, they’d have contingency plans, better security,” Chad Weinman told UPI. “We’re just really disappointed with what we thought was a major, able, safe Internet services provider.”
