GoDaddy Says Crash Wasn’t Anonymous, It Wasn’t A Hack, It Wasn’t A DDoS. It Was Internal Network Issues

GoDaddy has confirmed that its DNS problems yesterday, which caused thousands of websites to go down for most of the day, are now over. And while an alleged member of the hacktivist group Anonymous was claiming responsibility for the situation yesterday, GoDaddy says that it wasn’t an external network attack that caused it, but rather “a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.”

A statement from the company’s interim CEO Scott Wagner further notes: “Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions for our customers and GoDaddy.com.” The company says that it has put systems into place to prevent this from happening again.

As the company noted yesterday afternoon, no customer data was compromised in the process.

Yesterday a person calling himself Anonymous Own3r claimed responsibility for the attacks. He even went so far as to say yesterday that he was lessening his attack soon, when it was being made clear that recovery was on the way.

This instability in GoDaddy’s network has had (perhaps just coincidentally) an unfortunate correlation to instability at the top of the organization. Wagner assumed the job of CEO at GoDaddy on an interim basis at the end of July after a tumultuous CEO upheaval that first saw “elephant-killing” CEO Bob Parsons step down 10 months ago to be replaced by Warren Adelman for only eight months.

Wagner in this note writes that GoDaddy had up to now provided a 99.999% update on its DNS infrastructure. “We have let our customers down and we know it.”

The apology may not be enough to convince some. As we reported yesterday, Asana’s Dustin Moskovitz wrote on Quora that the downtime was a spur to his company to finally make the move from GoDaddy. While GoDaddy said it wasn’t a hack, several people seem to be doubting the statement. One example:

Go Daddy Site Outage Investigation Completed

“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.

We take our business and our customers’ businesses very seriously. We apologize to our customers for these events and thank them for their patience.”

– Scott Wagner

Go Daddy Interim CEO