GoDaddy Disruption Hurts Small Business Sites

An outage resulting from a deliberate hacker attack on GoDaddy, the world's largest domain registrar, took down or affected millions of Websites and e-mail accounts hosted through GoDaddy as well as domains registered with the company Monday. Many of those, including Small Business Trends and its related sites, belonged to small businesses, and most were not too happy to say the least. Here is basically what happened:

Downtime

From the front lines. GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll reported the outage began around 1:25 p.m. EDT, and by 5:43 p.m. the majority of service to the company's customers including an estimated 5 million Websites, had been restored. Though one Twitter feed belonging to a hacker group called “Anonymous” took credit for the outage, another seemed to distance the group from the attack. Associated Press

Tango down. A Twitter user with the handle “Anonymous Own3r” claimed credit for the outage using the hashtag #tangodown, apparently to indicate having taken the company offline. One tipster told a journalist the failure was caused by inaccessibility to GoDaddy's DNS servers. Failure may have included GoDaddy phone service and anything else requiring access to those servers. TechCrunch

Reaction

Hopping mad. Some online business owners and operators didn't bother to hide their fury. Editor Mike Daly not only vented his own frustration over the unnamed hacker who claimed responsibility for the attack, but shared the reactions of other angry business owners and managers. No matter what the motives, they made it clear that small businesses had been hurt in the process. Adotas

Puppet show. On the other hand, some businesses responded to the situation by thinking creatively. One even created a puppet show, complete with musical performance, to share more about the plight of small businesses affected by the outage. Here is a list of how other small business owners reacted with great creativity to help customers adapt. Vocus

Alternatives emerge. Of course, another reaction came from GoDaddy competitor HostGator. It's important to remember in small business that problems experienced by competitors and their customers can also be opportunities. In this case HostGator offered huge discounts on its services for customers using the coupon code “Godaddyisdown.” Shout Me Loud

Aftermath

Lessons learned. For all the headaches Monday's outage brought, online marketing consultant Brian Saemann argues it is also a great reminder of how vulnerable your online business assets can be without the proper precautions. Of course, the GoDaddy outage could have happened to anyone, but there may be steps you can take to make your online presence more secure. Go Beyond SEO

Back to normal. As Monday's GoDaddy drama subsided, some additional details about the extent and nature of the problems that may have affected an untold number of sites, many run by small businesses, emerged. GoDaddy says no sensitive information was compromised during the “attack”, but details about how it happened are sketchy and business owners remain concerned. PC World