GoDaddy says internal problem, not hackers, caused massive outage

GoDaddy said hackers were not responsible for millions of websites it hosts going offline Monday.

The Arizona-based company, which has registered more than 53 million Internet domains and hosts more than 5 million websites, said the issues were caused by internal problems.

“The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS),” the company’s interim chief executive, Scott Wagner, said in an email statement Tuesday morning. “We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.”

Wagner said once the company identified the issues, it began restoring users’ websites. He also said GoDaddy has “implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.”

Wagner apologized for the problems and said GoDaddy was aware that it had let down its customers. However, he didn’t say the company would do anything to make it up to its customers.

“Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure,” he said. “This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves.”

GoDaddy-hosted sites began going offline around 10:30 a.m. PDT Monday, and the company said in a tweet sent out after 5 p.m. that most sites were back online:

The outages may have hit small businesses hardest; many such businesses choose to go with GoDaddy, in part due to the company’s annual Super Bowl commercial that boasts cheap rates.

At least one company told the Los Angeles Times that Monday’s issues caused it to lose thousands of dollars.

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