Why Did GoDaddy Fail?

By Cynthia Herbert :: 12:29 PM

When GoDaddy, the domain registrar and web hosting provider, failed yesterday, initial reports, including our own, pointed to a claim by loosely-organized hacker group Anonymous.

Now that things are back up and running at the Arizona-based company, GoDaddy is shifting the blame to themselves, claiming that a series network errors within their own systems created a bug that corrupted their router data tables.

There is no outside corroboration of GoDaddy’s claim, and the fact that they mention router tables leaves the door open for discussion for one of the rumors floating around yesterday, that they were the victim of a highly calculated SQL injection attack. An SQL injection attack is a technique often used to attack databases through their website front-end.  This is done by including portions of SQL statements in a web form field that results in the website passing a newly formed  SQL command to the database. At this point, the hacker can manipulate the database on their own.

There is, of course, no information one way or the other, but with an outage this large and a claim of responsibility from an outside group, law enforcement will likely be called in to investigate.

In a statement to their customers, GoDaddy’s interim CEO Scott Wagner said,

“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.”