Was the GoDaddy Outage Caused by a Hacker or by a Malfunction?

Thousands of websites hosted by GoDaddy, the giant domain registrar and web-hosting company, went down several hours Monday causing mayhem to a lot of small businesses that rely on the company’s service. The outage started at around 1:25 pm EDT. The giant firm only managed to get its systems up at 5:43 pm EDT, causing a big administrative headache to the millions of online businesses dependent on its service. The outage also caused widespread internet problems on Monday.

photo credit:  newschannel9.com

A hacker who called himself @AnonymousOwn3r claimed responsibility for the outage through twitter. In broken English, the hacker said he was merely testing how safe cyber security is, in answer to a question posed by a reporter from the tech blog Mashable.

GoDaddy’s interim CEO, Scott Wagner, in an emailed statement Tuesday, denied that the outage was in any way caused by a hacker, nor was it a denial of service attack (DDoS). He explained that they have pinpointed the cause of the service outage to “a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.” He claimed that at no time were any of their customers’ data at risk nor were any of their systems compromised at any point during the outage. He assured their clients that they have taken steps to prevent any similar happenings in the future.

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