GoDaddy's big or bigger blunder?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

So earlier this week the world saw what would happen if GoDaddy were to suddenly close up shop and leave town. Reports spread quickly, and an a member of “Anonymous” stepped forward saying he is the one who brought GoDaddy to their knees.

Although this may or may not be true, GoDaddy emphatically and categorically denies that such a thing happened. They say an internal error caused the several hour outage.

My co-workers and I crunched a few numbers yesterday and it could be said that GoDaddy is affiliated with some 30 million domain names, if we looked at the right information. Maybe more, maybe less… But would it really matter? Would you like to admit that a mistake, one wrong keystroke, brought down such a huge chunk of the internet? Or would you rather hope that your customers are sympathetic to your plight, that you were an unfair target and they were the collateral damage of a DDOS attack by “some nasty hackers.”

Was their mistake causing their own problem? Or was their bigger mistake admitting it? Does that open them up to a wider swath of people who want to leverage a class action lawsuit against them? They may have had a lawsuit dropped on them either way, in fact you can nearly be certain it will happen, but will more people be likely to pile on without remorse knowing that GoDaddy themselves caused the issue? It’s hard to say for sure, but I think GoDaddy may have slipped up big, this time.