GoDaddy says it was not hacker-attacked

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SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Sept. 11 (UPI) -- GoDaddy said Tuesday an internal snafu, not a hacker attack, caused a major outage that brought down the U.S. Web hosting giant and its 10.5 million customers.

Monday's "service outage was not caused by external influences," as claimed by an alleged hacker, interim Chief Executive Officer Scott Wagner said in a statement. "It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS)."

With a DDoS attack, a targeted website or network resource becomes so overloaded with communications requests that it can't respond to legitimate traffic and eventually collapses due to server overload.

"We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables," his statement said. "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.

"At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised."

A person professing to support the Anonymous rogue hacker confederation claimed Monday to have caused the interruption, which Wagner said started shortly after 1 p.m. EDT and continued until 7 p.m.

A Twitter account often associated with Anonymous, @AnonyOps, distanced the group from Monday's attack.

GoDaddy's own Web site, which was also brought down by the attack, was back up and running Tuesday.

"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."

DNS is the service that allows Web users to type words for website domain names, such as upi.com, instead of the underlying number and dot codes of the Internet Protocol address.

GoDaddy hosts and provides services and software to hundreds of thousands of online businesses, many of them small to midsize operations that rely on GoDaddy for their lifeblood.

Chad Weinman, chief executive officer of RunningShoes.com, told United Press International late Monday night his company lost as much as $50,000 in sales, not counting salaries and other expenses, during Monday's outage.

He called the interruption "devastating" and said his parent company, which operates 10 online retail sites, was thinking about leaving GoDaddy.

"It feels to me that a company of that size, they'd have contingency plans, better security," Weinman told UPI. "We're just really disappointed with what we thought was a major, able, safe Internet services provider."

The 8-year-old St. Louis company, with nearly 50 employees, couldn't even sell over the phone "because our call center relies on the Web" to complete orders, he said. "The whole business is Web-centric."

"We certainly hope the worst was behind us," he told UPI.