Earlier today we reported how GoDaddy suffered a major outage, affecting millions of websites and hosted e-mail accounts that are run through the hosting and domain registrar’s DNS services. Now it looks like the sites are coming back up, but GoDaddy has yet to confirm whether the outage was due to a distributed denial of service attack — the reason claimed by a member of the Anonymous hacking collective — or how many sites and emails and overall customers were actually affected. It has, however, stated that no sensitive information was breached as a result of the outage. Meanwhile, one high-profile site, Asana, is now making its migration from GoDaddy a top priority.
GoDaddy reports that it’s making progress but is still investigating the problem.
It also notes that it is “Getting closer to normal.”
Meanwhile the Downforeveryoneorjustme service is noting that both GoDaddy and affiliated site DomainsPricedRight are actually both up. Both had shown as down earlier today at the start of the shutdown.
Wired is reporting that in fact the solution has not been to fix the problem on GoDaddy’s DNS services but to migrate to GoDaddy’s competitor Verisign. Again, there has been no confirmation from either GoDaddy or Verisign about this. Update: It looks like the GoDaddy.com domain was the only one moved to Verisign temporarily. It’s now back to GoDaddy itself.
The company’s phone lines are still offering an automatic apology and directing callers to Twitter for the latest details on the situation.
That’s not enough, it seems. On Quora, someone asked why the collaboration app Asana hosts with GoDaddy.
Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Asana, responds to note that it will be hastening its departure from GoDaddy as a result of today’s incident:
This was a poorly thought out decision, made by me, at the very beginning of the company. It is unfortunately somewhat high friction to change, but we’ve already had it on our task list to migrate. This morning’s outage (following one of our own—nobody’s perfect!) will certainly hasten that departure.
Although the hacker Anonymous Own3r is claiming responsibility, he has yet to offer any proof of his role or explain a motive.
We’ll update the story as we learn more.
Update: GoDaddy has sent us the following response. Still no confirmation on the reasons.
“At around 10:25 am PT, GoDaddy.com and associated customer services experienced intermittent outages. Services began to be restored for the bulk of affected customers at 2:43 pm PT.
At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised.”