GoDaddy announced Thursday 30 percent across-the-board discounts to its customers as an apology for an outage that knocked out the company’s services for several hours this week.
“We owe you a big apology for the intermittent service outages we experienced on September 10 that may have impacted your website, your e-mail and other Go Daddy services,” GoDaddy CEO Scott Wagner writes in an e-mail to the company’s customers.
“We let you down and we know it,” he adds. “We take our responsibilities—and the trust you place in us—very seriously. I cannot express how sorry I am to those of you who were inconvenienced.” Wagner maintains that throughout its history GoDaddy’s DNS infrastructure has provided 99.999 percent uptime: “This is the level of performance we expect from ourselves.”
The 30 percent discounts will be available for the next seven days by using the code Apology4a at checkout. With the discount, registering a .com domain for a year costs about $9.10. That compares favorably with other registrars who charge around $13 a year for a .com domain. In the past, however, GoDaddy has offered limited-time one-year deals on .com domains for as little at $7.99 a year.
In Wagner’s letter, GoDaddy’s CEO attributes the service outage to “a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.” He adds that corrective measures had been taken to fix the problem.
Boasts, hassles follow outage
A person with the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn3r, a self-proclaimed member of the hacker collective Anonymous, exploited the GoDaddy outage to boast that he’d taken the company’s infrastructure down with a DDoS attack orchestrated through Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a popular hacker channel for communication.
GoDaddy is the Net’s largest registrar of domain names—it manages more than 50 million of them—and hosts some 5 million websites, many of them belonging to small businesses.
Some of those businesses felt embarrassed when their sites hosted by GoDaddy went black on Monday, even though it wasn’t their fault. Barre Army Navy Store in Vermont, for example, offered an across-the-board 20 percent discount on any phone or Internet purchases on the day after the outage.
“Rough day yesterday,” store proprietor Steve Barbour wrote to his customers in a September 11 e-mail. “Today promises more of the same.”
“The attack on GoDaddy yesterday left sections of our site off line but functional,” he said. “The fix initiated by our host [GoDaddy] left us non-functional. So much for quick fixes.”
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