Go Daddy insisted on Tuesday that the service outage that affected possibly millions of its customers a day earlier was not, as had been claimed, down to hackers, but instead was the result of a technical glitch.
Many users signed up to the web hosting giant – small businesses among them – saw their websites disappear from the Internet for around six hours on Monday as Go Daddy engineers battled to get its service back up and running.
Despite claims of responsibility coming from someone with the Twitter name AnonymousOwn3r, Go Daddy insisted that after investigating the outage, it had not been the victim of a denial of service attack.
Responding to the damaging events, Scott Wagner, Go Daddy’s CEO, issued a statement on Tuesday outlining what went wrong, though he declined to give details regarding the nature of the technical mishap.
“The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a ‘hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS),” Wagner said in the statement.
He continued, “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.”
Wagner reassured customers that no Go Daddy systems were compromised during the glitch and that at no time was any customer data at risk. He ended the statement with an apology and thanked Go Daddy customers for their patience.
Founded in 1997, Arizona-based Go Daddy manages over 50 million domain names and hosts more than five million websites, though it’s not clear precisely how many of these were knocked out by Monday’s technical problems.