Web hosting firm GoDaddy has claimed internal network issues caused its recent extended downtime, not the actions of hackers or any other external party.
In a statement the company said: "The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a "hack" and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). 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," the statement added.
The outage lasted for around six hours and took thousands of websites offline. As well as being on of the world’s biggest hosting companies, GoDaddy is also the largest domain registrar.
Someone claiming to be affiliated with hacking group Anonymous claimed credit for the attack, saying on Twitter that the attack was launched to test GoDaddy’s security.
As CBR speculated in our earlier article, GoDaddy is a strange target for Anonymous to attack. It hosts websites for thousands of small and medium businesses who rely entirely on the internet for business. That goes against the Anonymous mantra of helping the 99%.
GoDaddy’ support for anti-piracy act SOPA was listed as a possible reason for the attack, even though GoDaddy reversed its position many months ago.
This episode also shows off the difficult in categorising Anonymous. Anyone can claim a connection with the group and claim responsibility for something. The disparate and secretive nature of Anonymous means it is sensible to take any proclamations from people claiming to be connected to it with a pinch of salt.
