Grant Gross
Senior Writer

GoDaddy hit with denial-of-service attack

news
Mar 12, 20072 mins

Hosting company's service intermittent for hours on Sunday

Domain registrar and hosting company GoDaddy.com was hit with “significant and sustained” distributed denial-of-service attacks Sunday, the company said.

The attacks caused four to five hours of intermittent service disruptions, including hosting and e-mail, said Neil Warner, GoDaddy’s chief information security officer, in an e-mail forwarded by the company’s public-relations department. The services were back by later in the day.

The problems were not caused by GoDaddy’s response to the U.S. early switch to Daylight Saving Time (DST), Warner said. On Friday, one customer expressed concerns that GoDaddy would not be ready for the switch Sunday after the company’s technical support team told him it didn’t need to install DST patches because its servers are located in Arizona, which does not observe DST.

“With regard to DST, GoDaddy has been engaged in preparation and patching and worked closely with our vendors for some time leading up to the DST change,” Warner said in his e-mail, reiterating a statement he made on Friday, after IDG News Service asked the company about the customer’s concern.

GoDaddy has made “significant” investments to protect against attacks, he added. Its security teams will analyze the attacks to “identify additional defense mechanisms that can be used,” Warner said.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

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