Here’s a little proof positive that services like SiteUptime are vital to protecting your website’s online reputation. On September 11, 2012, the worst kind of outage imaginable took place: GoDaddy itself came tumbling down.

Yup, you read that right.

GoDaddy’s website tumbled right off the grid and remained out of service for a period of hours that Monday in an attack of unprecedented proportions. That meant that many of the 10.5 million webmasters using the Internet mega-company to host their sites were rendered impotent as they waited (impatiently) for the lights to come back on at GoDaddy HQ. GoDaddy’s official website was also unreachable during the attack.

What Happened, in a Nutshell

The legendary Internet hacking group Anonymous initially took credit for the alleged Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. The security leader of the group, who goes by “Anonymous Own3r” on Twitter, took sole credit for the takedown.

During the chaos, when questioned whether the group was responsible for the attack, Anonymous Own3r tweeted this response:

“@wordwhacker nah it’s not Anonymous coletive the attack is coming just from me.”

After things were restored to (relative) normalcy, GoDaddy released a statement in which it claimed that the outage was in fact not an attack by Anonymous after all:

“Yesterday, GoDaddy.com and many of our customers experienced intermittent service outages starting shortly after 10 a.m. PDT. Service was fully restored by 4 p.m. PDT.

The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined 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 measures to prevent this from occurring again.”

Keeping Watch Over Your Website’s Uptime

Was the attack indeed instigated by Anonymous, or was it simply a result of the “internal issues” that GoDaddy claimed? We may never know, but one thing is certain: outages can happen for a variety of reasons – at any time. Even to the heaviest hitters on the Web like GoDaddy.

That’s why it’s vital to keep watch over your website’s uptime… constantly. Unfortunately, you likely don’t have that kind of time. After all, you’ve got a website to run. That’s why using a service like SiteUptime is critical to protecting your bottom line when future catastrophes like GoDaddy’s inevitably rear their ugly heads.

Site owners using SiteUptime were aware of the problem before their unfortunate peers got wind of things, so they were able to warn customers, take appropriate precautions, and make arrangements before it was too late. The advanced notice likely saved thousands of dollars for those who played it smart and chose to monitor their websites for potential downtime.

Disasters like this will continue to plague the Web for years to come, which is why it’s vital to protect your investment by heading bad guys off at the pass with monitoring services like SiteUptime.