New York — GoDaddy, the massive Web hosting company, on Monday was hit by an outage reportedly carried out by a member of Anonymous zapping around thousands and possibly millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com went down for several hours, causing trouble for the mainly small businesses that rely on the service.
A Twitter feed that seems to be affiliated with a hacker using the “Anonymous Own3r” account claimed credit for the outage, but this could not be confirmed instantly. Another Twitter account, known to be associated with Anonymous, suggested the first one was just taking advantage of an outage it had nothing to do with.
However, GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said the hiccup occurred shortly after 1 p.m. EDT. Then around 5:50 p.m. EDT, the GoDaddy.com website and sites hosted by the company were back up and running. Driscoll had said the company was looking into the cause. She said she did not have many details and was hoping to be able to give an update with more information in the next 24 hours.
“Most customer hosted sites back online. We are constantly working out the last few kinks for our site & control centers. Also, no customer data has been compromised,” GoDaddy tweeted on its official Twitter account at about 8:30 p.m. ET.
A GoDaddy spokesperson informed PCWorld that the snag began at around 1:25 p.m. and that “services for the bulk of affected customers were restored” at 5:43 p.m. PCMag reported that the GoDaddy.com website was loading properly at their offices in New York at as of 3:30 p.m.
In an interview this afternoon, Driscoll emphasized that she could not say what the cause of the outage was, and that she could neither confirm nor deny claims made by the owner of a Twitter account affiliated with the Anonymous online activist collective who has boasted of causing the outage with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS). She also said she could not say how many sites were affected, whether it was thousands or millions, or whether the outage had affected just sites hosted by Go Daddy or those who use its DNS services as well. She did say the outage started just after 10 a.m. PT today.
“The problem is I just do not have a lot of information for you right now,” Driscoll said.
The company updated its Twitter feed with this: “We are still working. Getting closer to normal. Thanks for all your patience and understanding.”
Go Daddy’s Twitter account confirmed the outage.
A member of Anonymous who uses the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn3r and portrays himself as the “security leader of #Anonymous,” claimed credit for the attack on the domain registrar, famous for its racy television ads in the United States.
“How long do you guys think i should let http://www.godaddy.com/ under my #tangodown,” AnonymousOwn3r wrote. The unknown actor later denied that the GoDaddy take-down was a coordinated effort carried out by Anonymous as a whole. “[T]he attack it is coming only from me,” AnonymousOwn3r wrote.
However, an updated message on the Go Daddy Support site read: “We are aware of an issue affecting several services, including email, our website and some customer websites. We understand your frustration. We want you to know that our team is investigating the source of the issue and is working to resolve it as quickly as possible.”
Twitter users were complaining that numerous sites hosted by the company were inaccessible. Responding to tweets from shocking customers complaining about the outage and asking when it would be resolved, Go Daddy had tweeted: “Sorry to hear all your frustration. We are working feverishly to resolve as soon as possible.”
Above all, GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5 million websites, mostly for small businesses. And websites that were grumbling on Twitter about the hiccup included MixForSale.com, which sells accessories with Japanese animation themes, and YouWatch.org, a video-sharing site.
Catherine Grison, an interior designer in San Francisco who manages the site YourFrenchAccent.com, said she had to suspend sending emails with her website link in them while the outage was ongoing. The site is where she displays her portfolio of work.
“If I have no visuals I have nothing left except the accent,” said Grison, a native of Paris. She said she was already hunting around for another site host because she was unhappy with GoDaddy’s customer service.
It was not yet clear what AnonymousOwn3r’s motive was for the attack, if indeed that person carried it out. However, the individual’s command of English appeared vague–one of AnonymousOwn3r’s tweets, in which the individual apparently boasted of knocking 52 million sites offline, was written in Portuguese.