Millions of sites hosted by GoDaddy.com went offline on Monday for about four hours starting at 1:25 p.m. ET and were finally restored to the majority of affected customers around 5:43 p.m. The reason for the major web outage has not yet been revealed, but there is speculation that it was due to an attack by a hacker. The company has noted that no sensitive customer information was disclosed to the hacker.
GoDaddy.com assured customers that their identities, addresses, credit card information and other data were not compromised to the hacker in an interview by eWeek. GoDaddy went on to publicly apologize for the outage via Twitter.
Shortly after the problem was discovered, someone going by the Twitter username “AnonymousOwn3r” took credit for this major internet outage. Before taking credit, AnonymousOwn3r was proclaimed the attacker by another Twitter user: “AnonOpsLegion.” AnonymousOwn3r seemingly stated that he wanted to test the safety of cyber security. He also noted that this was not the workings of a nameless group; instead he stated it was his doings alone.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Kenneth Borg indicated that he believes that the hackers did not realize the impact that they would have on small business owners who rely on GoDaddy to run their sites. “I’m definitely one for upsetting the establishment in some cases, and I understand that if he’s going after GoDaddy, he may have had many reasons for doing that, but I don’t think he realized that he was affecting so many small businesses, and not just a major company.”
This isn’t the first time that the GoDaddy internet hosting registrar has been targeting to hackings; it was previously targeted in response to its support for the Stop Online Privacy Act. In 2011, a Google bomb was started against GoDaddy in an attempt to lower its ranking in search results.
If you are in need of a web hosting company for your business with personal service, Xponex Web Hosting is for you. A problem with many web hosting companies is outages, which is why Xponex Web Hosting has an unparalleled server up-time of over 99.96 percent. In addition, you are provided with direct phone numbers to sales AND support so if there ever is a problem or outage you will be provided with the support that you need from an actual representative.
