SCOTTSDALE, AZ (CBS5) -
An outage at GoDaddy.com Monday was not the work of a hacker despite a braggadocio post on Twitter claiming responsibility, a company spokesman said Tuesday morning.
Go Daddy interim CEO Scott Wagner said the outage that affected thousands of businesses whose websites and emails are handled by Go Daddy was because of a "series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables."
Wagner said the issue was identified and service was restored to Go Daddy customers by 4 p.m. The outage began around 10 a.m., Wagner said.
Thousands of small businesses noticed GoDaddy.com's servers had been knocked offline, taking websites and emails with it like at the Canteen Modern Tequila Bar on Mill Avenue in Tempe.
"It basically grinded a lot of our progress to a halt," said Bar Manager Rich Rush. "I don't know what to believe."
Wagner said the outage was not a "hack" and was not a denial of service attack (DDoS).
Computer expert Bryan Schiele said Tuesday that a denial of service attack would have taken down the computer or computers that host all of Go Daddy's information for the websites and email addresses they host. He said it is unlikely that one person could do this.
"If it was more of a malicious attack by somebody, there would have been data compromised, there would have been a breach of security, personal information would have been released."
News of the outage spread on social media, via Twitter. Go Daddy soon acknowledged the problem tweeting, "Status Alert: Hey, all. We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it."
A member of the online hacker group named Anonymous soon took responsibility for the outage and tweeted, "Hello godaddy.com now yes! all servers #tangodown by @AnonymousOwn3r."
Another post was tweeted by the Anonymous member in broken English [sic]: "I'm taking godaddy down bacause well i'd like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now."
He said Go Daddy implemented measures that should prevent a similar outage in the future.
He emphasized that no customer data - such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses - were at risk at any time and that the company's systems were never compromised.
"Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999 (percent) uptime in our DNS infrastructure," Wagner said in a statement apologizing to customers. "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."
Copyright 2012 CBS 5 (Meredith Corporation). All rights reserved.
An outage at GoDaddy.com Monday was not the work of a hacker despite a braggadocio post on Twitter claiming responsibility, a company spokesman said.
