Update on September 11: Go Daddy completes investigation into site outage, declares no hacking involved

A member of the Anonymous hacktivist group appears to have taken down GoDaddy with a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). The widespread issue seems to be affecting countless websites and services around the world, although not for everyone.

Godaddy.com is down, but so are some of the site’s DNS servers, which means GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, and lots more. It’s currently unclear if the servers are being unresponsive or if they are completely offline. Either way, the result is that if your DNS is hosted on GoDaddy, your site may also look as if it is down, because it cannot resolve.

Here’s the tweet that started it all, courtesy of AnonOpsLegion, which has some 3,900 followers on Twitter:

AnonymousOwn3r is claiming sole responsibility for the attack, which is why we haven’t seen this tweeted out by much bigger Twitter accounts such as YourAnonNews (over 628,000 followers) or AnonOps (over 299,000 followers). Either way, this is being done under the “Anonymous” name even if the main communication channels aren’t being used to announce it (though I’m pretty sure they will catch on soon enough).

The good news is that GoDaddy is aware of the issue:

Status Alert: Hey, all. We’re aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We’re working on it. — Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012

I first saw this problem when Convo stopped working for me, ironically stopping me from communicating with The Next Web staff and getting this story out quickly. The service isn’t down for my colleagues, however, which shows just how erratic the problem is.

This tweet, which was retweeted by AnonOpsLegion, sums up the situation perfectly:

Update: GoDaddy just sent out a second tweet, this time with an apology. Here it is:

So many messages, can’t get to you all… Sorry to hear all your frustration. We’re working feverishly to resolve as soon as possible. — Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012

Update 2: The reason for the attack is still unclear. Here’s the closest we have:

@film_girl I’m taking godaddy down bacause well i’d like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now — Anonymous Own3r (@AnonymousOwn3r) September 10, 2012

Update 3: This outage is so massive it has taken down downforeveryoneorjustme.com. Talk about irony.

Update 4: GoDaddy is finally fixing the problem.

Update: Still working on it, but we’re making progress. Some service has already been restored. Stick with us. — Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012

Update 5: Anonymous is distancing itself from this attack. Remember, anyone can call themselves Anonymous:

Please redirect your godaddy hate to @anonymousown3r says is the ‘leader’ of Anonymous. #derp Have #lulz with that. — Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) September 10, 2012

Update 6: GoDaddy is still hard at work. It’s now the company’s top priority (as if it wasn’t before, heh):

We’re continuing our work to get back on track. This is our #1 priority. We’ll keep posting updates here. Thanks for all the support. — Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012

Update 7: Someone noticed that GoDaddy’s DNS servers are pointing to VeriSign, one of its competitors. A Hacker News submission has the details.

Update 8: GoDaddy.com is working for me again. The issue still isn’t completely fixed though:

Update: More progress has been made. We’re still investigating and working, though. — Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012

Update 9: More progress, still not completely fixed.

We’re still working. Getting closer to normal. Thanks for all your patience and understanding. — Go Daddy (@GoDaddy) September 10, 2012

Update 10: Problem solved.

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 (@GoDaddy) September 11, 2012

Update on September 11: Go Daddy completes investigation into site outage, declares no hacking involved

Image credit: stock.xchng

Read next: Google starts censoring The Pirate Bay domains in Google Instant and Autocomplete