Go Daddy outage due to internal problems, not hacking, company says

A widespread service outage of GoDaddy. com-hosted websites Monday was due to internal network problems rather than hacking, the company said Tuesday.

The outages began shortly after 8 a.m. Central Daylight Time. Service was fully restored by 2 p.m.

Widespread media reports had indicated Go Daddy was targeted in a denial of service attack due to its initial support for the Stop Online Piracy Act, a position that proved so controversial within the Internet community that it later reversed field.

Go Daddy attempted to contradict those reports in a prepared statement.

"The service outage was not caused by external influences," the report said. "It was not a "hack" and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS)."

The company's corrected version of events was entirely different, although not flattering to Go Daddy's network management capabilities.

"We have let our customers down and we know it," Go Daddy said, apologizing to customers.

The official Go Daddy version of events went like this:

"We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables," the statement said. "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 company said that "at no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised."

The company defended its overall reliability record, saying that over its entire history it provided 99.999% uptime in its domain name system (DNS) infrastructure.

The DNS is a technology that translates names into Internet Protocol addresses to make web surfing much less complicated.

Go Daddy is based in Scottsdale, Ariz., but has a growing customer service center in Hiawatha.