GoDaddy suffered an outage yesterday taking millions of domains offline after an attack by a hacker using the name “Anonymous Own3r” on Twitter. After about four hours the GoDaddy website was back up and service was restored for the bulk of their customers.
Techcrunch reports that the outage was caused by computers being unable to reach GoDaddy’s DNS servers, DNS servers are how computers know which server to connect to in order to view a website. The trouble is when GoDaddy couldn’t be accessed neither could the millions of small business websites hosted by GoDaddy. GoDaddy claim to be the largest hosting provider of secure websites in the world with more than 10.5 million customers and more than 53 million domain names under management.
Sadly there’s little most small businesses can do to protect them against this sort of outage as it’s pretty much out of their control. Other than choosing a different host and domain registrar, your hands are pretty much tied. All we can rely on is that companies like GoDaddy put the very best security procedures in place as prevention is better than cure, and trust that they’ll recover from attacks as quickly as possible.
6 Responses
If it was just the DNS servers that went down then there is plenty someone can do to avoid this. Just run your own DNS servers. Rackspace provides cloud servers as cheap as $0.015 per hour so one could run two DNS servers themselves in two different colos greatly reducing the likelyhood of ever not being able to be resolved. Add extra nodes that take over in case of failure through something like heartbeat to reduce this likelyhood even further. You don’t even have to run them with the same provider so you could add a free micro instance from Amazon to the mix.
Might be something to do with this as i know a lot of people who left or threatened to leave GoDaddy because of it with Wikipedia being the biggest.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16320149
Well apparently it wasn’t the hacker who claimed responsibility… according to GoDaddy it was a network failure! Somehow that would concern me more than if it was a hack.
“Yesterday, GoDaddy.com and many of our customers experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT.
The service outage was not caused by external influences. 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.
At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.
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.”
– Scott Wagner
Go Daddy Interim CEO“