(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- Due to a mysterious distributed denial-of-service attack, several thousand websites hosted by GoDaddy.com (www.godaddy.com) intermittently flickered on and offline Wednesday morning for a period of hours.
CNET blogger Bob Walsh reported the outage Wednesday, writing that GoDaddy communications manager Nick Fuller stated that while many sites were interrupted, neither e-mail nor DNS services were interrupted. Also, while tech support reported that the DDoS attack made several thousand sites unreachable, this only represents a very small percentage of GoDaddy's customer base.
Regardless, complaints began circulating shortly after the outage. Los Angeles lifestyle blog LA Snark was one of the sites affected, which wrote about being confused and irritated.
"It has been brought to our attention that you have been experiencing brief periods of site outtages. In order to best assist you, we will need to re-produce the errors that you are experiencing," read an email sent to LA Snark's Jack Stands from a GoDaddy hosting support representative.
The email on to ask the site operator for a "traceroute to the domain while the issue occurs." Which, typical and understandable of shared hosting customers, Stands had no idea what that meant.
A similar denial-of-service attack affected 600,000 GoDaddy hosting customers in November 2005, which lasted roughly an hour.
Source: http://thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/011509_GoDaddy.com_Outage_Sends_Thousands_Offline
