GoDaddy suffered an outage on Monday, Sept. 10, taking countless sites offline along with it. On Thursday, Sept. 13, GoDaddy apologized for the outage and announced 30 percent across-the-board discounts to its customers to make up for the damage, along with one month of free service.

"We owe you a big apology for the intermittent service outages we experienced on September 10 that may have impacted your website, your e-mail and other Go Daddy services," CEO Scott Wagner wrote in an e-mail sent to the company's customers. "We let you down and we know it," he added. "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.

According to Wagner, GoDaddy's DNS infrastructure has provided 99.999 percent uptime throughout its history.

"This is the level of performance we expect from ourselves," noted the CEO.

$9.10 for .com Domain

The 30 percent discounts across-the-board will be available for the next week using the code Apology4a at checkout. With the 30 percent off, registering a dot com domain for a year will now cost $9.10, compared to the roughly $13 a year other registrars charge for a dot com domain. GoDaddy, however, has had more enticing offers in the past, at one point offering limited-time one-year deals on dot com domains for just $7.99.

The company's CEO said the GoDaddy service outage was caused by "a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables." Wagner added that corrective measures had been taken to address the issue.

DDoS Attack

Using the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn3r, a self-proclaimed member of the hacker group Anonymous pointed to the GoDaddy outage and boasted of having taken down the company's infrastructure with a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack orchestrated through IRC (Internet Relay Chat), a popular hacker venue for communication.

GoDaddy is the Internet's largest registrar of domain names, managing more than 50 million of them and hosting roughly 5 million Web sites. Many of those 5 million Web sites belong to small businesses, which were thrown offline by the outage. Some of those businesses offered discounts of their own to make up to customers who were unable to access the Web site, while others reported that the outage left their site functional, but with offline sections, and later the fix initiated by GoDaddy left the entire site non-functional for a while.

Can the 30 percent discount make up for lost business?