Around Monday lunchtime, US time, many users of GoDaddy’s web hosting services found that their websites were inaccessible and their email was also blocked. GoDaddy’s DNS servers had been knocked offline and a short Twitter message was issued “Status Alert: Hey, all. We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it,” read the tweet. According to a GoDaddy spokesman speaking to PCMag the outage lasted over four hours. Seven hours ago things seemed to be more or less back to normal “Most customer hosted sites back online. We're working out the last few kinks for our site & control centers. No customer data compromised.” Tweeted GoDaddy.
Responsibility for the he attack upon GoDaddy was claimed by a hacker called Anonymousown3r. This Twitter user claims to be an “Anonymous Official member!” and “Security leader of #Anonymous”. Several other Twitter users replied to AnonymousOwn3r, one said, illustrating the size of the outage; “how are ppl supposed to listen to our music now bro - 52million sites down and we are one of them FML!!” This tweet was replied to by someone sympathetic with AnonymousOwn3r’s motives who said “This is not a random, senseless attack. Do your homework and try to understand why this was done.”
So why is GoDaddy a legitimate hacking target? The answer seems to be that GoDaddy supported the proposed SOPA and PIPA internet censorship and regulation Acts that were tabled in the US. That is until users vociferously complained; many also voted with their feet and got hosting elsewhere. The Anonymous Operations Twitter page @Anon_Central contains a fair amount of tweets about GoDaddy and internet freedom. “By using / supporting Godaddy, you are supporting censorship of the Internet,” tweeted Anonymous_Central.
According to The New York Times GoDaddy has 10.5 million customers, manages 52 million domain names and hosts 5 million web sites on its servers. Monday’s outages affected many small businesses, non-profit organisations and hobbyists. Will Monday’s inconvenience and the re-highlighting of GoDaddy’s history of supporting US censorship acts make any difference in the long run?
