Yesterday I posted a diary about a massive, multi-million website-impacting service outage that hit GoDaddy, the largest domain registrar in the world (as well as one of the largest website hosting providers).
The outage didn't just impact them, but also took down millions of their clients, their corporate servers, email services and even their phone lines. Even some customers who hosted their sites elsewhere but had their domain names registered via GoDaddy were impacted. The total outage period lasted around 6 hours.
At the time, a "rogue member" of Anonymous claimed responsibility.
Today, now that their servers and (apparently) all services are back up and running, GoDaddy is now claiming that they weren't hacked at all, and in fact the cause wasn't external at all:
Go Daddy: Network Issues, Not Hackers or DDoS, Caused Outage
Go Daddy says yesterday’s downtime, which caused extensive downtime for customers, was caused by corrupted data in router tables, rather than an external attack or hack. Routing tables a database of information about IP addresses and domain names, helping direct Internet users to the web sites they are requesting.
Many media outlets attributed the downtime to an electronic attacks, based on Twitter postings.
“The service outage was not caused by external influences,” said Scott Wagner, Go Daddy’d Interim CEO. “It was not a ‘hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.”
So...assuming that this is the case, it means that this wasn't a case of GoDaddy having serious security issues, it just means that they have serious server/network maintenance procedure issues.
Which one of these makes them look worse depends on your point of view.
As for whether GoDaddy's official response is truthful or not, I'm just a humble web developer, not a true system administrator, so I can't really speculate, but for whatever it's worth, the concensus over at SlashDot seems to be that the "corrupted router data tables" story is a crock of shit.