GoDaddy Cites Technical Issues

GoDaddy–one of the world’s largest Web hosting providers and domain name registrars–says a technical problem, and not an attack by hackers, was responsible for service disruptions that darkened websites and email for much of yesterday afternoon and evening.

Yesterday someone claiming to be a  member of the hacker group Anonymous (see “Is Anonymous Less Anonymous Now?”)  claimed responsibility for silencing GoDaddy with a distributed denial-of-service attack. In such an attack, a website is deluged with so many electronic requests that it can’t keep up.  

But in a statement on Tuesday, Scott Wagner, GoDaddy’s CEO, says that in fact, the outage “was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables,” and not any attack. He said the problem has been fixed, and that user data was not compromised. GoDaddy is used by more than 5 million websites.

This post has been updated to reflect GoDaddy’s response.