Go Daddy: Service outage not caused by hacker attack

Go Daddy, a major Web hosting company and domain name registrar, said the service outage its website and other sites that use its hosting service suffered on Monday was not caused by a hack or "external influences."

"It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack," Go Daddy's interim Chief Executive Officer Scott Wagner said in a statement on the company's site on Tuesday. "We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables."

Wagner's statement disputes comments made by a person, allegedly associated with the hack group Anonymous, who claimed responsibility for the service outage on Twitter. It's estimated that millions of websites that use Go Daddy's hosting service were inaccessible for several hours as a result of the disruption.

Wagner said Go Daddy's service was fully restored by the end of Monday. He added that "at no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised."

He apologized to customers for the disruption, saying the company has accepted responsibility for the outage and taken steps to ensure it doesn't happen a second time.

"Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves," Wagner said. "We have let our customers down and we know it."

But the Twitter user that claimed responsibility for Go Daddy's outage, called "@Anonymous Ow3r," shot back at Wagner's statement and argued that the hosting company was hiding the real cause of the disruption to save face.

"whooa @godaddy is denying that it was hacked by me! they don't wanna show their cybersecurity is bad this way they would lose customers ! " the user tweeted. "I think i will have to bring down http://www.godaddy.com again, so this way they would admit instead of hiding the attack."

But there's reason to be skeptical about the alleged hacker's claims. A digital publishing company admitted this week that the Apple device information procured by hacker group AntiSec was stolen from its computer systems via a cyberattack, contradicting earlier reports that the data came from a compromised FBI computer.