GoDaddy DNS Servers Crash, Anonymous Takes Credit

GoDaddy DNS servers crashed on Monday morning leaving thousands, perhaps even millions of websites without internet access. The crash led to thousands of website owner searching for the term “GoDaddy Down” on Google, Bing and Yahoo in a hectic bid to find out why their websites are non-operational.

GoDaddy was quick to announce the outage, tweeting from its @GoDaddy account:

“Status Alert: Hey, all. We’re aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We’re working on it.”

Following the outage GoDaddy was apparently bombarded with Tweets from angry users, leading to the following message:

“So many messages, can’t get to you all… Sorry to hear all your frustration. We’re working feverishly to resolve as soon as possible.”W

With GoDaddy down the company was also bombarded with calls to its customer service line which now offers the following voice message:

“If you are having a problem with your email, we are aware of the problem.”

Customers who are worried about the general status of their website are being urged to visit: Down For Everyone Or Just Me (so many people are using the free service right now it may be down at times).

Following the attack various Twitter accounts claiming to be associated with the hacktivist group Anonymous took credit.

In one message the account @AnonOpsLegion tweeted:

“By using / supporting Godaddy, you are supporting censorship of the Internet.”

Anonymous eventually took full credit for the attack with the release of a YouTube video:

[iframe src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/SPGBZWGUE2g” width=”560″ height=”315″]

At this time the attack appears to have affected many websites, thousands of GoDaddy based email accounts and some users who have domains registered with GoDaddy but use third-party hosting providers.

While Anonymous may be claiming to help internet users small business owners have been especially angered by the attack, including at least one user who typically supports the hacktivist group:

@anonopslegion @anonymousown3r I generally support your cause but the only people you hurt are small bus. that can’t privatize their hosting

— Dave Blasfome (@Dave_Blasfome) September 10, 2012

Major news sites have even begun to attack GoDaddy over the server, email and domain registry attacks. Tech website Mashable has gone so far as to publish a visual gallery that shows users how to switch registrars the moment GoDaddy services are once again accessible. Here’s step one to get you started:

Some analysts have predicted that Anonymous hit GoDaddy with a ‘denial of service” or “DDoS” attack. Such an attack floods a platforms servers with more traffic than they can handle, eventually causing the platforms servers to crash.

GoDaddy is not responding to requests for more information, likely because their email and phone systems are too congested to receive messages. In fact GoDaddy tweeted the following message shortly following the attack:

So many messages, can’t get to you all… Sorry to hear all your frustration. We’re working feverishly to resolve as soon as possible.

— Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012

With more than 48 million domain names and 9.3 million customers the company can probably expect a lot more complaint emails and endless phone calls for the next few days.

What might be most scary about the GoDaddy crash is that the company’s original Tweet only eluded to the GoDaddy.com website being taken down until customers pointed out that the service interruption included outside emails, websites and DNS records.

With GoDaddy down website owners are now forced to wait out the storm, possibly losing millions of dollars in combined earnings along the way.