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Millions of Websites Down as Godaddy.com Computer Systems and Servers Were Attacked by Hacker – Website Not Loading

GoDaddy Hacked. On Monday, 10 September 2012, for an extended period of time, the Godaddy.com website was not loading, and at the time of this posting it still doesn’t load. There is an outage that has impacted millions of websites. It’s been determined that there was a deliberate hacker attack of the GoDaddy computers. This may have been because of one or more controversies surrounding GoDaddy.

Twitter Updates. Updates from GoDaddy are available on the GoDaddy Twitter page. A snapshot of recent tweets as of about 5PM Central Time is below. The GoDaddy Facebook page also has updates and user comments.

Commentary. Website developers are aware of the problem because some of their customer websites are down.

“A client of mine called because their business website wasn’t loading. My first instinct was to check their GoDaddy account, but when the GoDaddy website wouldn’t load, I knew there was a serious problem. I began to check the websites of other customers I know who use GoDaddy. Their sites were down as well. I then checked the news and learned that the outage is massive and impacting potentially millions of websites.” ~ Greg Johnson, Iowa City Web Design Artist

News. Hundreds of news stories about the GoDaddy system hack have been reported. Here are some excerpts.

  • A malicious flood of network traffic has knocked Internet registrar GoDaddy’s servers offline — taking with it the site, its email, and thousands, potentially millions of websites registered through one of the Internet’s most popular services. [Fox News]
  • Web sites serviced by DNS and hosting provider Go Daddy were down today. A hacker using the “Anonymous Own3r” Twitter account claimed credit for the outage. [CNet]
  • “Basically, every GoDaddy site on the planet just crashed,” [CBS News, quoting a Twitter comment]

By Greg Johnson

Greg Johnson is a freelance writer and tech consultant in Iowa City. He is also the founder and Director of the ResourcesForLife.com website. Learn more at AboutGregJohnson.com