GoDaddy 'hacked', small-business sites go down

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NEW YORK: Thousands and possibly millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com went down for several hours on Monday, causing trouble for the mainly small businesses that rely on the service.

A Twitter feed that claimed to be affiliated with the "Anonymous" hacker group said it was behind the outage, but that couldn't be confirmed. Another Twitter account, known to be associated with Anonymous, suggested the first one was just taking advantage of an outage it had nothing to do with.

GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said the outage began at around 1:25 pm EDT (1725 GMT). By around 5:43 pm EDT (2143 GMT), the GoDaddy.com website was back up and service was restored for the bulk of its customers. Driscoll said there was no loss of sensitive customer information such as credit card data or passwords and that the company was investigating the cause.

GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5 million websites, mostly for small businesses. Websites that were complaining on Twitter about outages included MixForSale.com, which sells accessories with Japanese animation themes, and YouWatch.org, a video-sharing site.

Catherine Grison, an interior designer in San Francisco who operates the site YourFrenchAccent.com, said she had to stop sending emails with her website link in them while the outage was ongoing. The site is where she displays her portfolio of work.

"If I have no visuals I have nothing left except the accent," said Grison, a native of Paris. She said she was already shopping around for another site host because she was unhappy with GoDaddy's customer service.

Earlier, Kenneth Borg, who works in a Long Beach, California, screen printing business, said fresnodogprints.com and two other sites were down. Their email addresses weren't working either.

"We run our entire business through websites and emails," Borg said.

The business even takes orders from its two physical stores through the web, so clerks had to use their personal email addresses to send in orders to the printing shop, causing an administrative headache, Borg said.

Borg said he could empathise to some extent with the hacker, if one was involved. GoDaddy was a target for "hacktivists" early this year, when it supported a copyright bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Movie and music studios had backed the changes, but critics said they would result in censorship and discourage internet innovation.

"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," Borg said. "But I don't think he realised that he was affecting so many small businesses, and not just a major company."

TOI
 

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GoDaddy Goes Down After Apparent DNS Server Outage



Many users of GoDaddy's web hosting services found their websites down and their e-mail not going through on Monday afternoon, apparently following a failure of the company's Domain Name Service servers.

GoDaddy announced the problems around 11 a.m. Pacific with a short Twitter message, saying: "We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it."

At the same time, posters to the Outages mailing list were reporting that GoDaddy's DNS servers — the computers that tell, among other things, internet browsers where to find web servers — had been knocked offline.

GoDaddy's website was offline too. After a 14-minute wait, a GoDaddy tech support technician confirmed that the companies services hadn't been working Monday, but he called the failure "intermittent," before referring inquiries to GoDaddy's public relations department. GoDaddy PR didn't return messages.

GoDaddy manages 5 million hosting accounts. It was not immediately clear how many of them were offline, but according to forum posts and GoDaddy's own Twitter feed, many customers are affected, after DNS servers in North America were knocked offline.

About an hour after its original post, GoDaddy said: "So many messages, can't get to you all"¦ Sorry to hear all your frustration. We're working feverishly to resolve as soon as possible."

By 1 p.m., GoDaddy said on Twitter that it was restoring some service.

An anonymous hacker named Anonymousown3r claimed responsibility for the outage, but it wasn't immediately possible to verify this claim.
 

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Amid Outage, GoDaddy Moves DNS to Competitor VeriSign

Following a day-long Domain Name Service server outage, web hosting provider GoDaddy is letting its competitor, VeriSign, host its DNS servers.

On Monday afternoon — about four hours after it was knocked offline — GoDaddy's administrators made a change to the company's DNS records, indicating that they were shifting control of the servers from GoDaddy to VeriSign.

GoDaddy has not explained the source of its widespread outage which knocked websites and e-mail users offline Monday. "We are experiencing intermittent outages. This is impacting our site and some customers' sites," GoDaddy said in a note sent to customers Monday. "The issue started shortly after 10am PDT."

The outage may have been due to a technical glitch, but a hacker named Anonymousown3r claimed responsibility for the outage. It hasn't been possible to verify this claim.

VeriSign, which competes with GoDaddy in the domain name registration business, also sells services to protect customers from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks — a favorite technique for leveling internet servers. Although it isn't clear what took GoDaddy's DNS servers down, the outage appears to be widespread. According to one observer, DNS servers at the company's U.S. data center were hit, but servers in Asia continued to operate normally.

According to Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer with antivirus company F-Secure, the move to VeriSign has a simple explanation: "They are moving to name servers which are not under attack," he said via direct message.

VeriSign and GoDaddy representatives did not respond to messages seeking comment.
 

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