GoDaddy Wipes out Significant Chunk of the Web in DNS Service Outage

More than 45 million domain names managed by hosting giant GoDaddy went dark yesterday in what appears to be one of the biggest failures of the DNS system in the history of the Internet. The unscheduled downtime triggered panic attacks among both webmasters who might have thought they were victims of hacks, and end-users who suddenly lost internet connection with their favorite websites.

Image credit: GoDaddy

The company, one of the biggest webhosting providers and domain name registrars in the world, announced that it was working on the issue and advised customers to be patient as the engineering team sorts the issue out. As the outage also affected the company`s main page, e-mail system and bulletin boards, they turned to Twitter to stay in touch with the customers.

“We are aware of an issue affecting several services, including e-mail, our website and some customer websites,” the company wrote in a status update on Monday. “We understand your frustration. We want you to know that our team is investigating the source of the issue and is working to resolve it as quickly as possible.“

Responsibility for the incident was apparently claimed by a member of Anonymous known under the AnonymousOwn3r handle, who did not disclose the reason for the alleged attack. Despite the claim, neither the affected company, nor internet service providers detected rogue traffic specific to distributed denial-of-service attacks.