GoDaddy Offering Customers One Month Compensation for Outage

As we reported on Tuesday, GoDaddy suffered a major outage that left thousands, and potentially millions of customers with downed websites and services. While a supposed member of the Anonymous collective took credit for an attack, GoDaddy has since concluded that no hack or distributed denial of service attack took place.

Instead, the company has posted on its site that the cause of the issue was a router that somehow had its data tables corrupted. Many have remained skeptical about this claim, however, as for a single router being able to take out all of GoDaddy seems unlikely. All hosts have, or should have, excellent redundancy in place. GoDaddy's outage didn't last mere minutes, but hours.

Nonetheless, it's been expected that the company would rightfully offer its customers some sort of compensation, and today, we find out what that is: one month free. Given the number of customers that GoDaddy has, some of which are sure to have significant services in place, the company stands to lose a lot of money with this mishap. However, although GoDaddy is loathed by many thanks to its original support of SOPA, among other things, it's to be commended for doing the right thing here.

The e-mail is as follows:

Dear (customer),

We owe you a big apology for the intermittent service outages we experienced on September 10 that may have impacted your website, your email and other Go Daddy services.

We let you down and we know it. We take our responsibilities - and the trust you place in us - very seriously. I cannot express how sorry I am to those of you who were inconvenienced.

The service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented a series of immediate measures to fix the problem.

At no time was any sensitive customer information, including credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised.

Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999% uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level of performance we expect from ourselves. Monday, we fell short of these expectations. We have learned from this event and will use it to drive improvement in our services.

As a result of this disruption, your account will be credited for the value of 1-month of service for each of your active/published sites. This credit will be available to you for the next 7 days. Please click the button below to redeem your credit.

It's an honor to serve you. Thank you for the opportunity to re-earn your business and trust.

As always, please call us 24/7 at 1-480-505-8877 — anytime, for any reason.

Sincerely,

Scott Wagner
CEO
GoDaddy.com

At the end of the e-mail will be a button that can be clicked to route you to your account in order to redeem the credit. This must be done within seven days of receiving the e-mail, so if you're a GoDaddy customer, keep an eye out. If after a couple of days you don't receive such an e-mail, it might be wise to contact customer service as this isn't an opportunity you'll likely want to pass up.