Large swaths of the Internet was rendered unreachable on Monday due to what GoDaddy is essentially calling a router issue. After whatever it was that caused GoDaddy’s services to hit the Internet equivalent of a brick wall happened, an unidentified hacker claimed that the outage was caused by a distributed denial-of-service attack on the provider. These claims were never verified, however, so the reality seems to actually be technological incompetence on the part of GoDaddy.
Specifically, the claims of DDoS attacks were denied by Scott Wagner, interim CEO of GoDaddy. “It was not a ‘hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS),” an email from Wagner read, according to Ars Technica. “We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.”
Once they actually knew what was to blame, service was quickly restored to those that still rely on the company. Given that this was an internal connectivity issue, there’s no chance that any data was exposed. The same problem that kept folks from visiting their typical haunts would have denied any scavengers looking to benefit from the disruption.
If nothing else, this proves once again that skepticism is healthy and that companies like GoDaddy are completely capable of screwing themselves without the help of others. “Internal network events” is just vague enough to cover situations like “Kevin spilled coffee on a major server, then tipped it over on an even bigger router.” This is where imagination comes in.
(via Ars Technica)
- GoDaddy got hit by backlash due to their SOPA stance
- They pretty quickly changed their tune
- That didn’t stop Wikipedia from moving away from them
