Godaddy.com, the largest domain name registrar in the world suffered a massive outage this weekend.
Multiple sources (here, here, here and here) have confirmed that Godaddy’s DNS servers went down for a period of several hours on Sunday, potentially because of the daylight savings time switch. In theory, every domain name registered with Godaddy was affected, representing one of the the largest single points of failure in Internet history.
So far, Godaddy hasn’t made any official comments about the reasons behind the outage except a short statement citing technical difficulties.
March 13th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
So?
March 13th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
The outage may of any reason but the impact is more than tolerrable. Millions of websites got a narrow escape…
Rethink the Matrix
March 13th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Other sources deny that it had anything to do with DST and cite a massive DDoS attack (SYN flooding to an insufficiently protected service).
March 13th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
I agree, what does DST have to do with critical components of a DNS server?
March 14th, 2007 at 12:57 am
Sounds like GoDaddy wasn’t very vigilant concerning their own equipment, but it doesn’t look like it really had any significant effect on anything. My websites (not hosted by GoDaddy) were not effected at all.
March 14th, 2007 at 1:37 am
Mine was affected, but no sever troubles other than the sites being down for a few hours.
March 14th, 2007 at 1:37 am
Mine was affected, but no severe troubles other than the sites being down for a few hours.
March 14th, 2007 at 3:11 am
If your site earns you a living, or creates revenue that allows you to pay for staff, even a few hours of downtime is very significant.
March 14th, 2007 at 3:28 am
If your site “earns you a living, or creates revenue that allows you to pay for staff”, you should be willing to pay more than $3/mo for hosting.
You get what you pay for… it applies to web hosting just like it applies to most everything else in life. The reason nobody really noticed, the reason this isn’t that big of a deal, is because no sites of any consequence are hosted by GoDaddy.
It kind of reminds me of the old tree falling in the forest question… if every site hosted by GoDaddy goes offline for a day, would anyone notice? Apparently not. At least not for a few days. LOL.
March 14th, 2007 at 3:52 am
I don’t think this was directly related to their web hosting services, Brandon, but to GoDaddy as a Domain Registrar, and there are plenty of websites that are registrered with GoDaddy that are not hosted by GoDaddy.
March 15th, 2007 at 3:21 am
Mine was down for a couple of hours , but there was a message on godaddy’s help section about a week before this happened explaining the servers were down for maintenance during sunday evening GMT !! i was ready for it.
It only lasted about 2 hours but this was the highest traffic time for me GGrrrr
March 16th, 2007 at 10:18 am
The DST effect *may* have had an influence given the workings of TTL and the recommended format of zone serial numbers. Godaddy may be running stealth primaries that feed the front line servers.
What I noticed was that webmaster related traffic was way down during that time period. Guess they had bigger fires to fight.
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March 22nd, 2007 at 2:42 am
A DNS server is for domains… This is not for websites hosted at GoDaddy.com, it’s for domains registered at GoDaddy.com.
August 7th, 2008 at 10:20 am
Hi i have the same problem today 06 August 2008 at 7:47 gmt -4. I can access my websites using a ip address. But not using the domain name. Apparently the DNS servers where my domains are hosted are down.
My dedicated servers are working fine. But without the domain names they are unavailable for my visitors. So im losing some money here. I cant beleive this single point of failure at this time.!!!!