Oh No, Not Again: GoDaddy Recovers From Extended Email Outage

GoDaddy’s email service experienced an extended outage this morning, affecting a portion of its customer base. The outage took down the email systems beginning around 7:00 AM ET (estimated) this morning, and the problems were fixed by 10:30 AM ET, according to the company.

We received numerous tips from readers about the problem, and Twitter was also filled with complaints. Though outages do happen from time to time with online services, GoDaddy had barely recovered from the bad PR surrounding the lengthy outage in September, which prompted the hosting company to offer customers a free month of hosting for their troubles. At the time, a member of online activist group Anonymous, acting independently from the collective, had originally claimed responsibility for taking the GoDaddy sites down. However, the company claimed it was due to internal errors on their end involving corrupted DNS tables. During that outage, GoDaddy’s email was affected too, as many on Twitter have also noted today.

GoDaddy says today’s issue affected “some” users, but has not yet clarified with us how many users specifically or what caused the problem. The communications team is working to get answers now, we’re told. We’ve given the company over an hour to respond to our questions, so at this point, we’ll just have to update this post when they get back to us.

In addition, the GoDaddy System Alerts page has been updated with a brief message regarding today’s outage:

For approximately three hours, customers were unable to log in to Web-Based Email and the Hosting Control Panel. Your email should be operating normally now, and no messages were lost during the disruption. Service has been fully restored and we are investigating the issue. We apologize for the inconvenience

Update: GoDaddy never provided a comment or explanation, despite further follow-up attempts.

Below, a selection representative of today’s tweets:

#Godaddy email is down again. Third time in as many months that I know of. Consider them cautiously.

—
Jim Ross, HD Pro (@JimRossInFocus) October 19, 2012

@GoDaddy I signed up w #godaddy a few months ago. you guys are averaging ISSUES about once every month and a half now?!?!?!

—
James Jackson (@jcjackson3) October 19, 2012

Is @godaddy's email down again? Ugh. Their worse than an abusive relationship!

—
  (@itscomplicated) October 19, 2012

Image credit: Twitter user jeffcarp