Earlier this week, social media was abuzz with activity that GoDaddy’s main site went down, with users reporting email and Web sites down across the platform. Anyone using GoDaddy.com as their web hosting company was affected, and according to a post on GoDaddy’s Twitter feed on Monday, the company said it was aware of the issue and was taking steps to amend.

At the time, it was rumored that a hacker had crashed the system, leading to major losses of sales to those who are customers of the Web hosting company. However, it was confirmed by GoDaddy, per a posting on LooksCloudy.com, that the incident was instead cause by internal network events.

According to a statement issued by GoDaddy Interim CEO Scott Wagner, “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.”

Regarding site security as a result of the outage, Wagner assured GoDaddy customers that “At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised.”

When the outage was first reported on Monday, according to LooksCloudy.com, “a hacker by the name of AnonymousOwn3R had immediately claimed responsibility for the outage and gained worldwide attention via twitter and media outlets. According to the released statement, this was not an attack at all but a software issue that has been seen before from other web/software companies.”

Sam Erdheim, director of network security strategy, AlgoSec, a network security management company, offered his thoughts on the outage, and why Web hosting companies such as GoDaddy need to look beyond individual incidents, and instead be proactive, rather than reactive. "It is easy to get caught up in the latest attack vector, data breach or cult of the celebrity hacker; however, what often gets overlooked is that poor security management plays an even larger role in terms of ensuring the security of your systems and information,” Erdheim said. “As this GoDaddy outage reveals, misconfigured network devices and improper changes can be just as dangerous to the stability of our networks as the latest attacks. Organizations should take a step back to ensure its processes are in order and its devices are securely configured to avoid these situations in the future."

Despite the Godaddy.com site outage investigation being complete, many website owners are still suffering the effects of the event. After a major hosting outage that causes the loss of hundreds or thousands of dollars in sales, thoughts of a future outage can linger in the mind of small business owners. However, GoDaddy.com says there is no reason to worry. “We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again,” the company said in a statement “but many website owners may consider an outage of this scale to be unacceptable.