GoDaddy Main Website Offline For About 4 Hours, Now Back Up

GoDaddy.com suffered a few hours of downtime this evening but appears to have just come back up. Acknowledged by the @GoDaddy Twitter account, the main www.GoDaddy.com page first redirected to a standard Microsoft IIS error page and then later redirected to an error 503 page. Neither of these were comforting sites for customers of “the web’s largest hosting and domain provider” though there were no reports of problems with DNS records or issues with hosted websites. Further more, customers were still able to access their accounts through subdomains and mobile versions of the site: http://mya.godaddy.com and http://www.godaddymobile.com/

According to the Twitter account, the outage was due to technical issues not “pirates” or hackers. As soon as the homepage came back up around 9:40PM CDT, the CIO posted to the GoDaddy Blog System Alerts to share details of the down-time.

You might have noticed our homepage was inaccessible for several hours earlier today. We take issues like this seriously, and understand the impact downtime can have on your business.

So what happened?

First, the most important factor: You. No customer account information was compromised. This was not an attack on Go Daddy servers. We caused the issue, not someone else. We made some changes to our website, and those updates failed. As a result, www.GoDaddy.com went down.

Here’s how we resolved the issue:

1. Our Social Media and Customer Support teams got the word out that customers could still access their Go Daddy accounts through godaddymobile.com and mya.godaddy.com.
2. We redirected our site to our mobile landing page, so you could continue to manage your domain names and make purchases.
3. We then rolled back the update that caused the issue, and restored service.

Unfortunately, the recovery time took longer than expected, and longer than I think is appropriate.

My team is investigating what went wrong with our site update process so we can avoid an issue like this in the future.

Thanks for being patient during the homepage interruption.

Neil Warner
Chief Information Officer

In a long list of recent breaches, a little technical glitch is a sigh of relief to the other possibilities for a company that boasts over nine million customers worldwide[1] though the CEO and Founder of GoDaddy’s antics and sexist, demeaning Super Bowl commercials might drive off customers as well. The important conclusion for customers is that the website is back up and from an infosec perspective, there is no data breach to report.