GoDaddy Outage Putting A Hurt On Small Businesses
The GoDaddy outage may have been a statement against the company’s support of legislation viewed as a threat to internet freedom, but the attack is having some unintended side effects with the small businesses that make up GoDaddy.com’s client base.
The attack that caused the GoDaddy outage was reportedly the result of the hacker group “Anonymous,” which sent a tweet taking credit for it, CNET reported. This has not been confirmed, as a different Twitter account associated with Anonymous claimed that the initial tweet was just opportunistic and the group actually had nothing to do with the GoDaddy outage.
Most of the five million websites hosted by GoDaddy belong to small businesses, the Christian Science Monitor reported. Many of these companies, including Japanese accessory seller MixForSale.com and video sharing site YouWatch.org, took to Twitter to complain about the GoDaddy outage.
The Christian Science Monitor found many small business owners impacted by the GoDaddy outage. Catherine Grison, an interior designer in San Francisco and owner of YourFrenchAccent.com, said the outage left her unable to link to her online gallery because of the outage.
“If I have no visuals I have nothing left except the accent,” said Grison, a Paris native.
The GoDaddy outage began at around 1:25 pm EDT, a company spokeswoman said. The site was back up by 5:42 pm EDT, the company noted. It has become a target for its support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. Critics said this copyright bill would be the equivalent of censorship and would stifle innovation on the internet.
