Go Daddy: Software Update Caused Outage

The main web site for the world’s largest domain registrar and web host, Go Daddy, was offline for approximately three hours Monday evening after a software update went awry, the company said. The GoDaddy.com home page was unavailable, prompting the company to redirect visitors to a mobile version of the site that remained available.

“We made some changes to our website, and those updates failed,” said Neil Warner, the Chief Information Officer. “As a result, www.GoDaddy.com went down. No customer account information was compromised. This was not an attack on Go Daddy servers. We caused the issue, not someone else.”

The redirection allowed users to continue to manage domain names and transactions. Go Daddy then rolled back the update to restore full service.

“Unfortunately, the recovery time took longer than expected, and longer than I think is appropriate,” said Warner. “My team is investigating what went wrong with our site update process so we can avoid an issue like this in the future.”

Go Daddy has more than 9 million customers and manages more than 48 million domains.

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.