Go Daddy: Network Issues, Not Hackers or DDoS, Caused Outage

Go Daddy says yesterday's downtime, which caused extensive downtime for customers, was caused by corrupted data in router tables, rather than an external attack or hack. Routing tables include a database of information about network destinations.

Many media outlets attributed the downtime to an electronic attack, based on Twitter postings.

"The service outage was not caused by external influences," said Scott Wagner, Go Daddy'd Interim CEO. "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 said the outage lasted six hours, with the services being interrupted beginning at 10 a.m. PT and being fully restored about 4 p.m. PT. The outage was widely felt because of the huge scope of Go Daddy's business. The company hosts 5 million web sites and manages a total of 52 million domain names.

"Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure," said Wagner. "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."