Millions of websites disappear from the internet

GoDaddy.com, the largest domain registrar in the world, has suffered a major failure of some kind in its DNS services. GoDaddy.com manages approximately 53 million domain names, though not all rely on GoDaddy's DNS services. Those that do use its DNS service and hosting service have been knocked completely offline (websites which only use GoDaddy for DNS but not hosting may still accessible via IP address.)

So, if your favorite website has been down today, this might be why; also any e-mail sent to an affected domain may or may not be delivered. And to add a wrinkle, Anonymous has claimed responsibility, though this has not been confirmed.

Further reading:
GoDaddy's Official Twitter page
Internet Storm Center daily diary

http://wtvr.com/2012/09/10/hacker-cripples-large-part-of-internet-with-godaddy-attack/
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/09/godaddy-goes-down/
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/09/10/godaddy-has-glitches-anonymous-claims-responsibility/

That explains it! I was wondering why a few websites were down.

Thanks for the news Andrew.

Cheers
Roger

GitHub was down today as well.. It was as if the world had ended at that point. They are still having a few issues as of writing this.

Update: GoDaddy says there was no hack, that it was a malfunction: https://www.godaddy.com/newscenter/release-view.aspx?news_item_id=410

Well that's good that Anonymous wasn't involved. They should be more prepared though. Huge blunder. Fortunately for me and my parents website isn't hosted there, but they are registered through Godaddy.

It seems that Anonymous didn't take credit for it after all. It was someone who pretended to be part of that group although the way the group is setup, anyone can claim to be part of it.

GoDaddy customers have been receiving this e-mail from GoDaddy's CEO:

Dear <Customer Name>,

We owe you a big apology for the intermittent service outages we experienced on September 10 that may have impacted your website, your email and other Go Daddy services.

We let you down and we know it. We take our responsibilities — and the trust you place in us — very seriously. I cannot express how sorry I am to those of you who were inconvenienced.

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 a series of immediate measures to fix the problem.

At no time was any sensitive customer information, including credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised.

Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level of performance we expect from ourselves. Monday, we fell short of these expectations. We have learned from this event and will use it to drive improvement in our services.

It's an honor to serve you. As always, please call us 24/7 at 480-505-8877 — anytime, for any reason.

Sincerely,
Scott Wagner
CEO
GoDaddy.com

Emphasis is original

Wow, i was wondering what was going on, thanks for the info.