Pictoral Representation of Godaddy’s Server Status
Where were you September 10th, 2012? If you are like many of GoDaddy’s customer’s you were sitting at your browser hitting your refresh button over and over again while simultaneously watching the trending #GoDaddyCrashes topic on Twitter.
Sometimes being one of the masses can be a liability. Instead of safety in numbers you are one of the expendable many. Rumor and report has it that hacker’s took down GoDaddywith a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). Why? Perhaps because GoDaddyannounced it’s support of the US Congress’s bill SOPA, anti-piracy legislation, which caused GoDaddyto come under fire from activist groups. While some of those groups were hackers, GoDaddyrenounced their position on SOPA months ago. So, why now?
Maybe it wasn’t hackers after all. According to GoDaddy’s official story the outage was not caused by “external influences.” I’m guessing that Bob in accounting tripped over a power cord and shut the routers down. No matter what happened we have been assured that our data was not comprimised and GoDaddy continues to provide 99.9% uptime.
What did the crash take down?
- People who host with GoDaddy
- People who register their domain with GoDaddy
- GoDaddyemail accounts
- All of the above
I did find that sites were still accessible through their unique IP addresses, which means people who understand how to use the Internet (as opposed to the World Wide Web) were still able to get to their content. Thankfully the sites were coming back online by close of business Monday, and hopefully no one is (much) worse for the wear.
I do recommend not keeping all of your eggs in one basket. If you can route your email address (MX server) somewhere other than Godaddy, like to Google Apps (see my previous post) at least your email will be immune to this type of attack. Also, have alternate means of communicating with your customer base. Events like this make Twitter and Facebook invaluable tools.
