GoDaddy Outage 2012; 'Anonymous' Hackers Suspected, Cause Still Unknown
Go Daddy Outage 2012 became a trending topic after the GoDaddy.com site became unavailable for several hours on Monday to the inconvenience of many small businesses. While the cause of the Go Daddy outage is unknown, hacker group--"Anonymous" is rumored to be involved in the crisis.
A Twitter message asserted that "Anonymous" was the reason for the Go Daddy outage on Monday. However, Bloomberg Businessweek reports that this claim has not been confirmed.
"Another Twitter account, known to be associated with Anonymous, suggested the first one was just taking advantage of an outage it had nothing to do with," the publication added.
Elizabeth Driscoll, spokesperson of GoDaddy reports that the outage occurred for a few hours between 1:25 until 5:43 PM. During this time, she affirms, no confidential data including passwords or credit card information was obtained during this time. The company is still investigating the cause of the service failure.
GoDaddy.com provides service for more than 5 millions websites. MixForSale.com and YouWatch.org were among the small businesses expressing their complaints and frustration due to the outage.
An interior designer from San Francisco, who operates YourFrenchAccent.com, claimed that she had to remove her website link from her emails while GoDaddy was down.
"If I have no visuals I have nothing left except the accent," said Catherine Grison. She also added that she had already been unhappy with costumer service at GoDaddy and continues to look for a new hosting site.
Kenneth Borg, who works at a screen printing business in California, also expressed that his emails were not usable during the outage and had to provide personal email addresses to make sales.
"We run our entire business through websites and emails," Borg said.
Borg continued to suggest that a hackers motivation for targeting one website could be understandable. However, he suggests that the hacker may not have realized how many people would be affected by this outage on GoDaddy.
"I'm definitely one for upsetting the establishment in some cases, and I understand that if he's going after GoDaddy, he may have had many reasons for doing that," Borg said. "But I don't think he realized that he was affecting so many small businesses, and not just a major company."
