Yes. For those of you that might have been hiding under a rock on Monday, there was a HUGE disturbance in the force. It was like the voices of millions of websites cried out and were suddenly silenced all at once. Our King, our Mohamed atop the mountain was … down. For hours on Monday the King of all web domains, GoDaddy, was nowhere to be found, on the web or anywhere else for that matter.
Well, at least it seemed like it.
With that, millions of websites and interactive outposts such as email accounts, e-commerce sites and blogs were shut off. Immediately, hundreds of “Cyber hackers” claimed to have brought the King to its knees. But in swift and decisive action, Tuesday, GoDaddy quelled all rumors as to their vulnerability to outside forces stating the outage was due to,
“a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables.”
That’s all well and fine. So what does the King of all URL’s do to assure their patrons, the masses in which it rules, that this will never happen again? What does the registrar of MILLIONS of business sites, personal sites, e-commerce outlets, hubs of business do to “make it up” to thei cutomers – some of whom may have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in business?
Eat Crow.
While, the losses that may have been experienced on Monday might be immeasurable, GoDaddy made a tremendous effort in giving their customers back some of the faith they once had in the behemoth business base.
In an email sent out to ALL of their customers today, GoDaddy went as far as to offer a whole month of credit to ALL of the sites and services hosted through their services.
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.
In this day of instant gratification and intangible services, value and service are hard to substantiate, and even harder to “give away.” With one mass email, the King of all URLs showed the value of their customers is more important to them than the perception of being flawless. And to give MILLIONS of customers, affected by the outage or not, a free month of service is an action unexpected and rare in this day of “it’s not my fault, it’s theirs…” Blame it on I.T.? They ARE I.T.!
I give a polite gentleman’s hat tip to the King. And with a nod to their wonderful PR department, their awesome marketing forces and those that “get it.” That’s how business needs to be done these days. When you mess up, admit it. Make it right. Take it on the chin like a MAN and go on with your day.
Considering the costs this action will be to GoDaddy, do you think this is the best action to take for the gaff on Monday? How, if you were the King of all URLs, would you handle the damage done to your brand? How would you address the millions of customers that you let down on Monday?
I’d love to hear what you think. You’re King for a day. Comment below and impart your wisdom upon your subjects!
Keep Cooking,
Andrew B. Clark
The Brand Chef
