Go Daddy says client Web sites back up

After spending most of the business day offline, services are restored for Go Daddy customers, company says.

Elinor Mills Former Staff Writer

Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service and the Associated Press.

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Elinor Mills

Sept. 10, 2012 5:10 p.m. PT

2 min read

Go Daddy is investigating an outage that pushed untold numbers of Web sites offline today.

Web sites serviced by Web hosting and domain registrar Go Daddy were back online early this evening after being down for much of the work day, a company spokeswoman told CNET.

"All services are restored and at no time was sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords, names, addresses, ever compromised," Go Daddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said in a phone interview just before 5 p.m. PT. She said the company does not know at this time exactly what caused the outage and she couldn't say exactly how many sites were affected.

"It did not affect all our customers, but I don't have an estimate on how many," she said. "We are working overnight on this and hope to have another update in the next 24 hours to put some specifics around what happened."

Someone using the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn2r had claimed to have caused the outage with a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), but that was not substantiated. Driscoll said she could neither confirm nor deny that claim.

The Go Daddy Twitter account was updated to read: "Most customer hosted sites back online. We're working out the last few kinks for our site & control centers. No customer data compromised."

Go Daddy had asked rival VeriSign to help provide DNS services for some Go Daddy customers affected by the outage, but "they are no longer running our DNS," she said. "We redirected DNS traffic for GoDaddy.com to Verisign's DNS servers. Our services are now back to normal, we are no longer redirecting DNS traffic," she added in an e-mail statement. "It was helpful because it allowed our customers to manage their accounts while we restored services. We thank Verisign for their assistance today."

Here is the official statement Driscoll sent via e-mail:

At around 10:25 am PT, GoDaddy.com and associated customer services experienced intermittent outages. Services began to be restored for the bulk of affected customers at 2:43 pm PT. At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised. We will provide an additional update within the next 24 hours. We want to thank our customers for their patience and support.

Updated at 7:10 p.m. PT with statement on VeriSign's help and 5:24 p.m. PT with more statement, more details and background