Website outage not result of Anonymous attack

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by Cody Kimball
Director of Technology

For nearly 3 hours on Monday afternoon, the Western Herald’s websites and email accounts were unreachable, and they were not alone. For several hours, websites and domain names hosted and registered by Godaddy.com, were plagued by network errors, making numerous websites and email services, including Godaddy.com’s own homepage inaccessible.

GoDaddy kept the public informed of their progress in dealing with the outage through their Twitter account, while many speculated about the cause of the problem. One Twitter user identified as “AnonymousOwn3r” claimed responsibility for the outage, stating that it was the result of an attack by a single member of the group known as “Anonymous”. The user claimed that the hacktivist collective was not responsible and that they had worked alone.

Scott Wagner, GoDaddy CEO, denies these claims.
In a September 11 blog post on the Godaddy website, Wagner says that the service outage “was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.” The cause of the outage was internal, not due to an outside attack. Wagner assures customers in the post that sensitive private information, such as passwords and credit card information was never compromised.
(Read the full posting at http://support.godaddy.com/godaddy/ceo-addresses-sept-10-service-outage/ )

GoDaddy is one of the world’s largest domain-name registrars on the Internet, as well as one of the largest website hosting services. The effects of the outage were widespread as an estimated 5 million websites are hosted on GoDaddy, which also manages approximately 52 million domain names.

At approximately 6:15 pm on Monday, service returned to www.westernherald.com, www.weekend-scene.com, and the Western Herald Mobile application, as well as all associated accounts.

In the event of future technical difficulties, the Western Herald will be reachable through Facebook, Twitter, and directly by telephone.

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