Around noon today EDT, this site along with countless others across the world suddenly went black.
While the HORROR REPORT may not have been the most important website that crashed, it was a casualty in one of the biggest online outages --ever.. the day that GoDaddy went down--not even Danica Patrick, with her racing car named desire, would be able to keep GoDaddy afloat..
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| DANICA COULDN'T KEEP THEM UP |
Millions of small business sites also went out.. Yes, that is millions with an M .. sites that rely on good hosting without outages.. sites that don't need downtime. They had lots of downtime today .. and briefly, until GoDaddy finally started Tweeting officials statements that they knew about the problem, it was almost like the company simply fell off the face of the earth.
I know I myself gave a quick phone call to GoDaddy when I realized my site lost the ability to be seen.. the call was ended quickly with a rapid busy signal on the other end.
No doubt millions of small business owners who saw their sales come to a screeching halt were also calling GoDaddy at the same time.
So what happened?
ANONYMOUS happened.
At least one member of the hacker group Anonymous took credit for the DNS attack that crippled GoDaddy's network and took down millions of pages with it. GoDaddy briefly supported SOPA in 2011--briefly until their public support caused public outrage and they backtracked off of being in favor of freedom of speech-impeding legislation. But Anonymous has a long memory.
As of right now, GoDaddy is not saying that Anonymous took down the entire network.. instead they have a short snippet of information on their website thanking customers for sticking with them, ensuring that credit card numbers and passwords were not stolen, and that they will write more within the next 24 hours on what exactly happened.
According to a NEW YORK TIMES report published late today that the Twitter account belonging to "Anonymous Own3r" posted a brief message stating:
@film_girl I'm taking godaddy down bacause well i'd like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now
If what this person said to Film_girl was right, he or she tested a network--and apparently a network fell.
But there is always a 'but' .. in this case, as the TIMES reported tonight, other Anonymous users are distancing themselves from the attack. One wrote that a technician pulled a cord out and blamed hackers..
Recently, GoDaddy's CEO stepped down. Warren Adelman was replaced by Scott Wagner. The site is known for its Danica Patrick ads during Superbowls. And now it's known to be a potential hack victim due to its short support of SOPA.