Noozhawk Among Websites Taken Down by GoDaddy Failure

http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/091012_noozhawk_among_websites_taken_down_by_godaddy_failure/

By Tom Bolton, Noozhawk Executive Editor | @tombol |

It's unclear whether the problem was caused by an internal failure at the giant Internet company or by hackers

Noozhawk‘s website could not be accessed by many readers for several hours Monday after servers went offline at web-hosting giant GoDaddy.

GoDaddy officials sent out messages on Twitter saying they were aware of the problem and were attempting to fix it.

It was unclear how widespread the problem was, but there were indications that thousands of websites were affected around the globe.

Someone on Twitter with the handle @AnonymousOwn3r claimed responsibility for taking down GoDaddy’s site, but offered no specific explanation for having done so.

Noozhawk is not hosted at GoDaddy, but has its DNS server there.

Noozhawk founder and publisher Bill Macfadyen said the online news source was working with its technical staff to restore service as quickly as possible.

“We’ve always been with GoDaddy because of the reliability, but clearly there was a false sense of security,” Macfadyen said.

“Coincidentally, just last week we mapped out plans to upgrade our site,” he added. “Our traffic has been growing quite rapidly — up more than 40 percent year over year — and August was our largest month to date. So we want to ensure we have the stability to handle the load as we grow. That will be done today instead of next week as planned.

“Regardless, if GoDaddy was, in fact, hacked, we view that as a theft of our property and an attack on our livelihood — and a cowardly one at that.”

During the outage, Noozhawk editors posted updates to the site’s Facebook page and kept readers informed through Twitter. Although GoDaddy’s DNS servers were offline, some readers were able to access Noozhawk throughout the disruption.

Check back with Noozhawk for more details on this situation as they become available.

— Noozhawk executive editor Tom Bolton can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.

http://www.noozhawk.com/noozhawk/article/091012_noozhawk_among_websites_taken_down_by_godaddy_failure/