from Hacker News

GoDaddy's DNS Service is Down

by davewasmer on 9/10/12, 5:44 PM with 288 comments

  • by mmaunder on 9/10/12, 9:29 PM

    Some data that may help:

    If you're in the rare situation of using GoDaddy DNS but don't use them as a registrar, then you're in luck. Simply sign up with a new DNS provider. They will give you their DNS servers which you need to set as the DNS servers that are authoritative for your domain. Then sign into your registrar and change the authoritative DNS servers for your domain. There will be a propagation delay but once it's done you're all set.

    If you are in the extremely common situation of having registered your domain through GoDaddy and also use their DNS service, then you have a problem because to move to another DNS provider you need to sign into GoDaddy.com to make the change I've described above i.e. change which DNS provider is authoritative for your domain. You can't do this until GoDaddy.com is back online. So what I suggest is that you sign up for a new DNS provider and then keep checking GoDaddy.com. As soon as it comes back online, sign in and make the change to your new provider as quick as you can.

    Other data:

    Whois requests for godaddy domains are currently failing because whois.godaddy.com is offline due to name resolution failure.

    Godaddy's twitter feed is a good source of updates, although they are claiming to be making progress and all my godaddy DNS hosted domains are still offline, so it seems to be more marketing speak than real data: https://twitter.com/godaddy

    As mentioned, Anonymous seems to be behind it as three tweets on their twitter account seem to indicate: https://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion

    I don't think the scale of this attack is fully understood yet. According to the CBC, GoDaddy hosts over 5 million websites (not sure if that's DNS, registrar, etc) so expect this to be big news and potentially the next political football.

    Edit: And finally, http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ is down for everyone because it's over quota. Via Reddit which is also covering this: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/znvwk/godaddycom...

  • by mattdeboard on 9/10/12, 6:57 PM

    General question here about upstream outages that can take down your site, e.g. DNS outage, AWS zone outage, etc.

    What to tell your customers when an upstream service provider experiences an outage? I mean, if you're running ifttt.com your users might be savvy enough to understand that a DNS outage isn't your fault; but pinterest.com or whatever (painting with broad strokes here, forgive me) might not have a user base that would understand that events out of your control have made your site inaccessible.

    How do you reassure your customers? What's the proper tone to take?

  • by KrisJordan on 9/10/12, 5:46 PM

    It looks like the root of the problem is that their DNS servers are unresponsive or offline. Web sites and mail whose DNS is hosted on GoDaddy appear to look "down" because they cannot resolve.

    Good push for anyone to switch to DNSMadeEasy or Amazon Route53 if you're currently caught in this.

    Update: It appears Anonymous is behind this https://twitter.com/AnonOpsLegion/status/245218636187443200

  • by ApsoFacto on 9/10/12, 7:52 PM

    I'm one of those people you call "stupid", who "deserves what I get". This is my first time posting here. I've used GD for years. Sure, they try to upsell me, but being in sales, I don't have a problem with giving them a firm "no thanks". If you do, that's your problem, not theirs. They're a business, for goodness sake. Realize that.

    And not only my sites are now down, but all the sites I maintain for clients. If some individual (or group) has done this intentionally, then these people are responsible for taking hundreds, maybe thousands of small businesses off line today. They're cutting into their sales, hurting their bottom lines, and if it continues for too long, will probably lead to people being laid off.

    So you can sit on your techie high horses and think you're oh so smart, but the fact is, these are real business people doing real business and criminals are hurting them. So you come down on the honest people for signing contracts and paying their bills on time?

    Seriously?

  • by amix on 9/10/12, 6:18 PM

    Does anybody have a guide on how to migrate away from GoDaddy without downtime? And what would you recommend instead? We currently host a bunch of domains and use their DNS servers.

  • by dshankar on 9/10/12, 6:36 PM

  • by azarias on 9/10/12, 8:18 PM

    This thread demonstrates that HN needs a comment collapse button a la reddit. The first comment thread, mostly useless, is taking most of the page, and no way to collapse it.

  • by nord on 9/10/12, 6:11 PM

  • by druiid on 9/10/12, 9:23 PM

    I'm assuming they're adding the Verisign DDoS protection service, but this change should make EVERY single Godaddy client very, very, very nervous (from the current whois):

       Domain Name: GODADDY.COM
   Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC
   Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com
   Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com
   Name Server: A1.VERISIGNDNS.COM
   Name Server: A2.VERISIGNDNS.COM
   Name Server: A3.VERISIGNDNS.COM
   Status: clientDeleteProhibited
   Status: clientRenewProhibited
   Status: clientTransferProhibited
   Status: clientUpdateProhibited
   Updated Date: 10-sep-2012
   Creation Date: 02-mar-1999
   Expiration Date: 01-nov-2021
    Yes, you read that right... they just implemented verisign name-servers. A multi-multi million (billion?) dollar company.

  • by semenko on 9/10/12, 6:12 PM

    Thread on Outages: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.isotf.outages/...

    The GoDaddy status page proudly announces "No issues to report": http://support.godaddy.com/system-alerts/

    During last week's GoDaddy mail outage, they had no status info posted, even hours after reports on NANOG/Outages: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.org.operators.isotf.outages/...

  • by Bill_Dimm on 9/10/12, 6:31 PM

    I love their latest tweet (1:35pm Eastern):

    Status Alert: Hey, all. We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it.

    That understates things by several orders of magnitude. It's not just their site that is down, it's their domain name servers, so most websites that bought their domain from GoDaddy are unreachable (unless you are working off of cached domain data).

  • by mckilljoy on 9/10/12, 7:47 PM

    I don't use GoDaddy, nor do I particularly like them, so this doesn't really affect me or my business directly.

    But I got a call earlier today from my less tech-savvy buddy who was freaking out because his GoDaddy website was down. Yea it is probably "his fault" for choosing them, and he probably "deserves it".

    Still, not everyone is born a leet computer hacker, and sometimes this is the only way people will learn, so I'm trying not to be too hard on people for that.

  • by ajennings on 9/10/12, 9:36 PM

    1. Add the following lines to your hosts file (/etc/hosts on unix/osx, \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts on windows):

      216.69.149.215 mya.godaddy.com
  216.69.149.90 idp.godaddy.com
  216.69.149.9 dcc.godaddy.com
    2. Go to https://mya.godaddy.com/ to manage your GoDaddy accounts.

    3. Change DNS providers.

  • by dollar on 9/10/12, 6:21 PM

    Interesting whois for GoDaddy. :)

    GODADDY.COM.VATAXIDERMIST.COM GODADDY.COM.THEYOUNGCONS.COM GODADDY.COM.THEVILLAGEAT63RDSTREET.COM GODADDY.COM.THEFOREXTHIEF.COM GODADDY.COM.THECOTTONWIFE.COM GODADDY.COM.TEST.CHUMCHUM.NET GODADDY.COM.STAGEDOORPRODUCTIONS.COM GODADDY.COM.SKATEONGRANDROLLERRINK.COM GODADDY.COM.SHOPCOULSDON.COM GODADDY.COM.SHIRLEEMCGARRY.COM GODADDY.COM.SETHPAPA.COM GODADDY.COM.SANGRAALBODYWORK.COM GODADDY.COM.RESPECTED.BY.WWW.DNDIALOG.COM GODADDY.COM.REMEDIASERVICES.COM GODADDY.COM.QUINTAFLORIDA.COM GODADDY.COM.QHSSE.COM GODADDY.COM.PISSEDOFFPEOPLEOFAMERICA.COM GODADDY.COM.MYANHOMEINSPECTION.COM GODADDY.COM.MUTTLANDMEADOWS.COM GODADDY.COM.MICHALPOE.COM GODADDY.COM.MERCHANTSSTORES.COM GODADDY.COM.LOVE8PLANET.COM GODADDY.COM.LEVIATHANCOMPUTERS.NET GODADDY.COM.LANDLCONNECTION.COM GODADDY.COM.KARLAADAMS.COM GODADDY.COM.JESSICABOAL.COM GODADDY.COM.IXCANADESIGNS.COM GODADDY.COM.INDYMETROWOMAN.COM GODADDY.COM.GGONYA.NET GODADDY.COM.GDDAS.COM GODADDY.COM.FLORIDASURETY.COM GODADDY.COM.FLETCHERANDFLETCHERPHOTOGRAPHY.COM GODADDY.COM.EZGRAPHICSLOGOS.COM GODADDY.COM.ERICAMDESIGNS.COM GODADDY.COM.EAGLEEYEHOMEMONITORING.COM GODADDY.COM.CLIFFYCELLS.COM GODADDY.COM.CAKEMUFFIN.COM GODADDY.COM.BERNADETTEHAROLD.COM GODADDY.COM.BANGALORESRESTAURANTS.COM GODADDY.COM.AUTHORMARIONBROWN.COM GODADDY.COM.AND.ALEX.FUCKED.BY.WWW.DNDIALOG.COM GODADDY.COM.ANALOGANIMALRECORDS.COM GODADDY.COM.ALEXANDREAREINA.COM GODADDY.COM.AIPOS.NET GODADDY.COM.1BEAUTYPRO.COM GODADDY.COM

  • by CD1212 on 9/10/12, 7:15 PM

    I just got an email from GoDaddy beginning: 'Todays Lesson -...'. I thought this might go into their service being down, backups or failover protection.

    But no, it carried on to: 'Today's Lesson - SAVINGS! 20% OFF*'

  • by maerek on 9/10/12, 6:18 PM

    Literally just transferred all of my domain names and DNS hosting away from GoDaddy last night. Should have done it after the SOPA fiasco - glad I didn't wait until today!

  • by crisnoble on 9/10/12, 7:34 PM

  • by arihant on 9/10/12, 7:38 PM

    GoDaddy has been providing me with excellent customer support for a decade. I'm not sure what the hate is all about.

    Sure, they didn't take my side in the SOPA debate, but I'd rather live in a world where everyone is entitled to their opinion.

    I'm also not comfortable with a group calling themselves "Hackers" giving my profession a foul name by activities like this. This is like bombing a nation which doesn't have same views as yours. Hackers, they are not. Shameful.

  • by chucknelson on 9/10/12, 7:19 PM

    Shouldn't we all know to use hover.com by now? Don't you all listen to 5by5 podcasts?! :)

    http://5by5.tv/partners/hover

  • by orienwu on 9/10/12, 6:42 PM

    There's a discussion about this on WHT.

    http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1190617

  • by sandeep45 on 9/10/12, 5:51 PM

    so every site hosted on goddady just fell off the internet

  • by lobster45 on 9/10/12, 11:19 PM

    This has been a known vulnerability for dns, as they are susceptible to DOS. We use network solutions for DNS but they can be taken down in a similar manner as GoDaddy.

    BTW one of the servers we needed to access did not resolve, but I was able to connect via IP instead of DNS. Host file baby!

  • by wethesheeple on 9/10/12, 11:06 PM

    In other news, IP addresses are still working. ;)

    So what can we conclude from this incident?

    GoDaddy's registrar service GoDaddy's authoritative DNS service GoDaddy's hosting service GoDaddy SSL certificates etc.

    They are all different services. When you link them all together and give GoDaddy control over your entire setup, if there's a problem with any one service, you can't recover as easily as if they were each handled independently. meme: "Do one thing well."

    "All-in-one" solutions, though they might provide convenience, might come at a cost in terms of disaster recovery. meme: SPOF

    I wonder if this thinking might also apply to software: using a single, large "all-in-one" program versus using lots of smaller, independent (and replaceable) programs.

  • by wethesheeple on 9/10/12, 7:55 PM

    Why is GoDaddy excluded from the requirement to provide port 43 whois service? Are they special? To my knowledge you can only get whois information on GoDaddy domain names from their website. Why only HTTP whois? Are they front-running?

  • by zrail on 9/10/12, 8:11 PM

    I recently rented a VPS specifically so I could run my own DNS. I use tinydns[1] on the VPS as a stealth primary to host my zones and then use BuddyNS[2] as my secondary. It works seamlessly and wasn't that hard to set up if you know how to work a command line.

    Of course, if someone were to do this same thing to BuddyNS I would be up a creek for a little while, but I could just login to Namecheap and point to a different secondary.

    [1]: http://tinydns.org/

    [2]: http://www.buddyns.com/

  • by kaiserama on 9/10/12, 9:20 PM

    Sure someone will post this as a new story, but it appears DNS services are back online. I checked a few of the sites I manage and they are now working.

    Now I need to bust a nut and get things moved off ASAP.

  • by veyron on 9/10/12, 9:52 PM

    Someone (I'm looking at you, gandi.net) should give a "GoDaddy is Down" discount for domain registration. I'm ready to migrate the domains I didn't change during the SOPA fiasco ...

  • by jaequery on 9/10/12, 6:29 PM

    It appears all that time/money spent putting into backups, replication, SANs, and redundancy goes down the toilet when your domain registrar goes down

  • by pointless on 9/10/12, 8:30 PM

    I found this hoping to gather some information about the DNS attack. And instead all I found was that as a nonprofit without enough money to invest in IT staff who might "know better", it's just too bad that we can't accept donations on our website for our homeless children we support because by using GoDaddy we got what we deserved. Was hoping to find information, but that isn't quite what I got.

  • by domainguy on 9/10/12, 7:53 PM

    I had domains with them marked "auto renew" that mysteriously had that status changed. Since all my domains were "auto renew" I wasn't monitoring my renewal notices. Suddenly I discovered that several domains had expired and had been purchased by others. Now that sucks and is a good reason for me to find another registrar, in addition to the moral misgivings I already had about them!

  • by vadimkatchkakov on 9/10/12, 7:11 PM

    and so, anonymous, after all this, why is http://www.scientology.org still up???

  • by robomartin on 9/10/12, 11:56 PM

    Godaddy.com is back up! (~4:45PM PST 10SEP12)

    I'd be really interesting to get some behind-the-scenes data on what happened and what it took to fix it.

  • by wrath on 9/10/12, 8:24 PM

    I'm against SOPA and these laws as much as the next guy and I don't agree with many of stances that godaddy takes, but assuming they were really hacked, it's because of idiots like anonymous that our freedom on the internet is in jeopardy. This kind of stuff will simply promote the governments around the world to pass laws regulating the internet.

  • by circa on 9/10/12, 7:42 PM

    man.. i'm so glad I jumped ship on my GoDaddy issues years ago. they were awful in every way. looks like they still are.

  • by ominds on 9/10/12, 7:58 PM

    I don't much care for blame as much as I care for alternatives. Who do some of the largest sites register their domains with? And I mean reliable and fast. For example, a whois showed me ycombinator.com is with EASYDNS TECHNOLOGIES. Google is with MARKMONITOR INC, which is totally overkill I bet. Suggestions? Recommendations?

  • by mongol on 9/10/12, 10:22 PM

    I have a kind of unvoluntary ping to my mailbox hosted at Gmail / Google Apps, "Buy Vigara" (sic) messages that arrive with a few minutes intervals since months ago. Google sorts them as spam correctly, but it is interesting to see how they are less and less frequent over the past hours. (Yes my domain is on godaddy)

  • by druiid on 9/10/12, 7:14 PM

    Is there any word on if this is a DDoS type attack (I've seen things like request saturation attacks on DNS servers before)? Or, is it an actual exploit issue? Seems perhaps that it might be the latter from what I've seen so far... Anon is claiming it is only one of their guys responsible for this outage.

  • by jbursky on 9/10/12, 6:10 PM

    Customer phone lines are down also.

  • by jbarham on 9/11/12, 12:13 AM

    FWIW I run the DNS hosting service SlickDNS (https://www.slickdns.com). The focus is ease-of-use, but there is also good redundancy with multiple name servers located in the US, UK and Japan.

  • by jakeburtn on 9/10/12, 7:15 PM

    I tried to set up my site on CloudFlare but it say's that it's not a valid domain name. I think they might be checking the DNS records for the site before you can set it up so it appears to be invalid. Does anyone know a way around this?

  • by Ensorceled on 9/10/12, 10:10 PM

    I moved the bulk of the sites I manage off of GD when the SOPA thing happened but left a couple because the pain of transferring was to much (read, client didn't want to).

    Surprisingly, all the reasons to stay on GD vanished this afternoon :-P

  • by knodi on 9/10/12, 9:14 PM

    Looks like the primary server cluster that handles all the incoming traffic at godaddy for all their went down. This caused the traffic failover to secondary servers which where unable to handle the load and crash.

    ETA is 6 hours

  • by sebiw on 9/10/12, 7:11 PM

    German hosting provider Hetzner, also had a DNS outage about one hour ago.

  • by letslink on 9/10/12, 7:29 PM

    GoDaddy never struck me as a particularly evil corporation, just practical. But I would be interested to hear any recommendations for an alternative hosting company, and the logic behind the choice.

  • by fledgeling on 9/10/12, 7:32 PM

    So.... just to get the ball rolling here... what did GoDaddy do to piss everyone off so much that they raised the ire of Anonymous? Other than the choice of Danika as a spokesmodel, I mean.

  • by mstachowiak on 9/10/12, 6:25 PM

    For those looking for a quick route around, you can find GoDaddy's IP address here: http://who.is/dns/godaddy.com/

  • by vivyrelax on 9/11/12, 6:17 PM

    An other site like downforeveroneorjustme.com is: http://www.cherchezvous.ca french site but work for any site.

  • by frannk on 9/10/12, 6:40 PM

    https://www.dnspod.com is a good FREE dns provider, focusing on domain/record management, you can have a try;

  • by savories on 9/10/12, 7:29 PM

    We've been on GD since our company (ecomm with revenue in mm) was founded with zero issues.

    Now we need to switch to DynDNS asap who say they are getting tons of calls right now

  • by shebson on 9/10/12, 7:14 PM

    They now have the DNS working for their own site, which means you can now log in and change your nameservers to another service like Route53.

  • by ApsoFacto on 9/10/12, 8:01 PM

    Godaddy has their email servers back on line already. I almost hope this was a hack attack, just to show how fast they could deal with it.

  • by sgt on 9/10/12, 8:52 PM

    I use gratisdns.dk, excellent free DNS service that I've used to years with high reliability. Helps to be able to read danish.

  • by brian_cloutier on 9/10/12, 8:18 PM

    Wow, just last week I finally started paying for DNS and migrated from GoDaddy. I didn't expect it to pay off this quickly!

  • by telecuda on 9/10/12, 9:58 PM

    Is any DNS/host outside of GoDaddy also effected right now? We're not on GoDaddy but having plenty of intermittent issues.

  • by philip1209 on 9/10/12, 7:28 PM

    I have a client that uses Godaddy email - I assume this means that any emails sent during the outage will be forever lost.

  • by dhimes on 9/10/12, 6:52 PM

    OK-- long shot here: Would anybody happen to have (or know how I can get) the ip address for yiiframework.com?

  • by frannk on 9/10/12, 6:58 PM

    ALL GoDaddy DNS monitor site: http://www.dnsgua.com/

  • by X-Istence on 9/10/12, 6:51 PM

    I am able to resolve www.godaddy.com, but I am unable to reach their web server on port 80 or 443.

  • by Kurtz79 on 9/10/12, 9:06 PM

    Even Coursera is down...

    http://twitter.com/coursera

  • by sjsotelo on 9/10/12, 7:31 PM

  • by danielweber on 9/10/12, 6:35 PM

    DNS seems to be a universally bad service. It seems to be what everyone skimps on.

  • by throwaway54-762 on 9/10/12, 7:15 PM

    Latest mirror from archive.org for those experiencing the slashdot effect: http://web.archive.org/web/20110724055653/http://www.godaddy...

  • by mythz on 9/10/12, 7:10 PM

    What are the best DNS servers that can be used instead?

  • by cardine on 9/10/12, 7:27 PM

    You should be using Moniker</conversation>

  • by mariuz on 9/10/12, 7:14 PM

  • by jakeburtn on 9/10/12, 7:26 PM

    Seems like it's working again

  • by prawn on 9/11/12, 5:21 AM

    An elephant never forgets.

  • by juddlyon on 9/10/12, 9:50 PM

    Burn baby burn!

    I usually don't root against companies but they are exceptionally bad.

  • by taf2 on 9/10/12, 9:11 PM

    yep, this just took twilio down

  • by gbin on 9/10/12, 6:38 PM

    The elephants are thanking Anonymous...

  • by uptownhr on 9/10/12, 6:23 PM

    internet holocaust!

  • by yoshhhhi on 9/10/12, 6:38 PM

    damn! my bussines is down!!!

  • by drivebyacct2 on 9/10/12, 6:08 PM

    If you are using GoDaddy for anything, you deserve what you get. If you are using GoDaddy for not just registration but also for DNS, I would just fix it as soon as possible and not tell anyone.

    Also, do backups, use good password practices, and everything else that everyone knows and the lazy will still fail to do.

    Oh, 20 seconds in and a downvote. I can take them, I didn't ignore the last 8 problems GoDaddy has been responsible for lately and am not hurting from this outage.

  • by kknate on 9/10/12, 6:45 PM

    Hey - everything is pretty much down right now, who thinks it's just godaddy? You should get a dog, name is clue - then you would have one.

    http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm