GoDaddy says sorry

GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest website hosting services, has apologised to customers for a massive outage that kept thousands of sites – including many in South Africa – offline last week.

American website hosting service GoDaddy has denied it was a victim of a hacking attack, but apologised to consumers for a massive outage that kept thousands of sites offline this week. GoDaddy is one of the world’s largest website hosting services, and many South African sites were also taken down by the outage. However, they were fully restored after about six hours. Scott Wagner, Go Daddy Interim CEO, issued a statement on Tuesday acknowledging thatGoDaddy.com and many of its customers “experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT.”” He was adamant the service outage was not caused by external influences, despite claims by the Anonymous hacker group that it was responsible. “”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.”” Wagner stressed that “”at no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised””. He added: “”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.”” On Wednesday, GoDaddy issued a further apology to its customers, in an e-mailed statement which read: “”We owe you a big apology for the intermittent service outages we experienced on September 10 that may have impacted your website, your email and other Go Daddy services. “”We let you down and we know it. We take our responsibilities ‚Äî and the trust you place in us ‚Äî very seriously. I cannot express how sorry I am to those of you who were inconvenienced. “”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 a series of immediate measures to fix the problem. “”At no time was any sensitive customer information, including credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised. “”Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level of performance we expect from ourselves. Monday, we fell short of these expectations. We have learned from this event and will use it to drive improvement in our services. “” Customers were told that, as a result of this disruption, their accounts would be credited for the value of 1-month of service for each of their active/published sites.

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