Update: Goatattack.com announced on April 28 that the service is running again, but a sender's name is now required to send messages. The service was formerly anonymous.

Someone got your goat? If you have their cell number, you can now give them something to ruminate over: a stampede of goat messages from Goatattack.com, the latest in Internet prankery.

Internet-based messaging is exploring some strange new worlds lately. Two weeks ago, we received a pitch from Boobsign.com, a site that has since been merged into the market-leading Tittygram in the great Russian mammary-based messaging consolidation of April 2015. And last week, we discovered Goatattack.com—the pinnacle of goat-pun based messaging platforms. Actually, it's the only goat-pun based messaging platform.

For as little as 59 cents, you can use Goat Attack to send prank messages with images of goats and goat-related texts from multiple sources to the cell numbers of your friends and enemies. There's a 50¢ premium on custom messages, which can be appended to the barrage of pointless punnery the site blasts at your selected targets.

I was initially suspicious of the site because of its lack of HTTPS support. So I reached out via Twitter and got a nearly immediate response:

Goat Attack was created by Chris Keenan and Brian Ruddy, two developers at the Raleigh, North Carolina-based Web startup Photofy. The entirety of the site runs on a Google Cloud instance running Windows Server. "There’s not much to talk about in the code," Ruddy told Ars in an e-mail. The back-end is C# MVC, and the messages sent to recipients are generated via the cloud messaging provider Twilio. "They have a pretty solid .NET API wrapper, so there wasn’t much to it," Ruddy explained.

But that doesn't explain the goats.

"As far as the inspiration goes, that’s sort of a funny story," Ruddy said. "After lunch one day last week doing goat loads of research on TechCrunch, Chris and I were bitching about runaway valuations of seemingly useless/silly apps and basically asked ourselves, 'What’s something we can write and deploy tonight?'"

The mobile app Yo may or may not have factored into the conversation.

"So, as we were going over dumb ideas in our endless Evernote lists, we realized Chris had purchased goatattack.com back in September," Ruddy said. "And we thought if it’s not going to be a game, 'wtf is a goat attack?' We set out to answer that question, but only the Internet can decide from here."

After a single beer-and-pizza fueled night, the two launched the site on Monday. "It was a slow move from Monday to today," Ruddy told Ars on Wednesday afternoon, "but around 10am I posted this on /r/internetisbeautiful and we jumped up to ~3600 current visitors on the site tracked with Google Analytics real time."

The site's initial lack of SSL, however, set off alarm bells with redditors, and others expressed concerns that it was a data mining operation. "It was live on reddit for almost an hour before the mods pulled it down because they deemed our phone number input to be 'personal info' and took the link down," Ruddy explained. "While it’s perceived that we store phone numbers to, according to a couple redditors, 'sell to distribution lists,' we actually store everything in a Redis instance which is purged as soon as the queue processes the 'attack'."

I decided to unleash the goats on a few test subjects: Ars' Lee Hutchison and Cyrus Farivar, and my unsuspecting son.











A short while later, my son stepped into my office. "Dad, I'm getting these weird goat messages..."

So far, Goat Attack has not exactly butted itself to world domination. As of last Thursday night, the site had served up about 2,900 attacks. "Without logging into the Braintree account, I don’t have exact figures on which ones were the basic six image or premium 14 image plans," Ruddy wrote. "We’re hoping it goes more viral and gets some decent growth in the next few days. We may not be the next shipyourenemiesglitter.com, but we’re definitely enjoying it."

After a brief outage shortly after this story was posted on April 23, Goat Attack restored service. But then Twilio suspended the site's API account citing "suspicious activity," according to Ruddy.

"I'm not able to comment on any particular customer," said Twilio's director of global communications Kay Kinton, "but I can tell you that we investigate all complaints of unauthorized use of the services and take immediate action if we find usage that violates our terms of service. In cases where the services are being used to contact end users without their consent, we will take action."

Since that's sort of the definition of Goatattack's service, it's understandable that Twilio might feel that way.

The company's website was up and running again on Tuesday, April 28. In a direct message on Twitter, Goat Attack wrote, "We straightened things out with Twilio (sender name now required) and got everything back up this afternoon."

According to Goatattack.com, pranksters will now need to supply their name to "comply with spam regulations and inform your friend who is sending the attack."

This story was originally posted on April 23 at 12:05pm CT.