GoDaddy outage not caused by hackers

Monday's GoDaddy sites outage, which took thousands of hosted web pages offline, was caused by internal router issues and not hackers, the company said.

Yesterday at roughly 10am Pacific time, sites associated with web hosting provider GoDaddy went dark for six hours. Hackers originally took credit for the take down. However, after an official investigation GoDaddy is saying the outage was caused by corrupted router data tables.

"The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a "hack" and it was not a denial of service (DDoS) attack. We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables," GoDaddy interim chief executive Scott Wagner said in a statement.

"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."

Wagner emphasised that at no time was customer data at risk. The interim chief executive stated that the company takes the necessary precautions to prevent attacks that may put user data at risk.

"Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999 percent uptime in our DNS infrastructure," Wagner continued.

"This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves. We have let our customers down and we know it."

For his part, alleged hacker "Anonymous Own3r" has hit back at GoDaddy's assertions. Through Twitter, the hacker claims the hosting provider's statement is a cover up.

The hacker, who said he was acting independently of the Anonymous hacktivist collective, went as far as to threaten to take down the site again to prove the attack was real.

"I think I will have to bring down GoDaddy again," Anonymous Own3r said on his Twitter feed.

"So this way they would admit [the hack] instead of hiding the attack."

It has been thought the alleged attack was spurred on by GoDaddy's support of controversial US internet piracy bill Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). GoDaddy revoked support for the bill following a public outcry on the issue early this year.