A whole lot of websites hosted by Scottsdale-based GoDaddy.com were inaccessible yesterday, and a self-proclaimed "leader" of the hacking collective Anonymous claimed credit for the outage.
Go Daddy's interim CEO says nobody "hacked" a damn thing, and it was actually the company's fault. (They're sorry about that.)
Here's part of the statement from Go Daddy interim CEO Scott Wagner:
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.
Anonymous members haven't been too hot on Go Daddy due to its previous support of federal legislation dealing with Internet privacy, so when a person claiming to be an Anonymous "leader" took credit for the outage, it seemed pretty plausible to most.
The first problem with that is Anonymous doesn't have "leaders," and several Twitter accounts associated with the collective said things to that effect, and pointed out that Anonymous -- as a group -- wasn't in on it.
While Go Daddy probably would've been better off just blaming hackers or something, now all the people who were website-less for a few hours yesterday can take it out on Go Daddy.
However, Wagner says they're really sorry about that:
"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.: