Go Daddy: Network Issues, Not Hacks Or DDoS, Caused Downtime

miller60 writes "GoDaddy says yesterday's downtime was caused by internal network problems that corrupted data in router tables. 'The service outage was not caused by external influences,' said Scott Wagner, Go Daddy's Interim CEO. 'It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). ... At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.' The outage lasted for at least six hours, and affected web sites and email for customers of the huge domain registrar."

Comments

Had to Take the Network Down...

[CanHasDIY]

... so the NSA could install their backdoors.

anonymous U So haxor!!!

[DeTech]

Wow, anonymous was so good they were undetectable... And they almost got away with it too. To bad anonymous caught them.

Doesn't Really Help

[Anonymous Coward]

This just makes them look even less competent as a service provider, if the problem was purely internal then.

Re:Doesn't Really Help

[dyingtolive]

Yup.

"Good news everyone, we weren't compromised. We're just incompetent!"

Re:Doesn't Really Help

[AlienSexist]

One way to be sure... hit em' again!

Re:Doesn't Really Help

[caknuckle]

This just makes them look even less competent as a service provider, if the problem was purely internal then.

It might make them look less competent, but on the flip side suggests an "isolated" incident, and that it won't likely happen again, whereas if it's hackers you as a customer may wonder when the next hack will happen and what effect it will have on your websites, DNS etc. I.e. we better move off before it gets targeted again.

Re:Doesn't Really Help

[Kaptain Kruton]

It makes GoDaddy appear incompetent to geeks and computer-savvy users. However, to the average person that does not know much about computers, they will accept it as a computer problem that 'just happens'.... just like all of the errors that they have on their home computers that supposedly have no cause. As long as GoDaddy makes the problem sound really technical while saying they know exactly what caused it and know how to quickly implement a solution that prevents future instances, they will appear competent to the average computer user. After all, to an average user, an admin's ability to solve a problem that sounds complex will make the admin's skill sound really impressive.

Remember many of GoDaddy's customers are individuals and small businesses that have mediocre computer skills that rely on a simplified WYSIWYG tool. To them, evil hackers that steal information are much worse than an annoying problem that just happens because computers all have problems (in their experience). As long as the customer doesn't realize that it was a problem that should not have occurred and it was only caused by incompetence, then they are less likely to lose those customers.

Re:Doesn't Really Help

[bill_mcgonigle]

"Good news everyone, we weren't compromised. We're just incompetent!"

And we already knew they were evil , so ....

GoDaddy for Congress!

(corporations are people, my friend)

Perhaps...

[ackthpt]

if they'd pay some of that massive advertising budget to competent employees, quality software and proper maintenance. ... naw, bring on the chick ads.

So that's, what, two big hits for Go Daddy this year?

Re:Lies

[dgatwood]

Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to GoDaddy's incompetence just as easily.

That makes more sense

[Spy Handler]

There was no other indication of a DDOS than the "I did it" tweet by a lone troll. To knock out someone as big as Godaddy for as long as they did would've required an epic-scale DDOS and you'd think something like that would've been noticed by their upstream providers.

This is the second time this week an Anonymous troll lied about an attack (the other one was stealing iPad device ID from FBI)... Anonymous's sterling reputation is being tarnished!

Re:Go away GoDaddy

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Hey, cut them some slack. Lying in public is one of the few pleasures of having a customer base that consists of people who don't know better...

Re:Lies

[maxwell demon]

What's worse: Not being able to keep your network running when someone actively tries to disrupt it, or not being able to keep your network running under otherwise perfectly normal conditions?

Re:Wow

[kwalker]

You would think so, but the company I work for uses GoDaddy (At least up until today we did, we may be going elsewhere now) for our registrar, but nothing else. We run our own DNS servers, our own web servers and load balancers, our own mail servers, etc. but we got scads of complaints about "the website is down" yesterday during the event. We traced it back to external DNS failures, but I have full-time monitoring on all of our systems and nothing on our end even hiccuped. It worked for some locations but not others.

It makes no sense to me either.

Well duh ...

[jest3r]

If one "anonymous" person could take down 5 million websites then we might as well give up on the Internets ...

Then again it could have been one GoDaddy Admin who accidentally misconfigured the routing tables that caused all of this ... I'd probably want to be anonymous if I was that person as well ...

99.999% Doesn't mean what you think it means

[Anonymous Coward]

They were down for 6 hours but still claim 99.999% uptime. But unless they have been around for more than 57 years, I dont' see how that is possible. Wonder what funky math they use to back up that number.
  https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=5+hours+%2F+(1-99.999%25)