If you were unable to connect to your favorite foodie blog or athletic message board to rant about the weekend games on Monday, you weren’t alone. Go Daddy’s servers went down early this week, leaving a large chunk of their customers’ websites at the mercy of Go Daddy’s tech team.
DMA and The Core were directly affected by this situation – we experienced an outage lasting over 6 hours! (Yikes!) But ironically, I want to take this time to applaud Go Daddy. I always get excited when I see a company knock it out of the park when handling a crisis situation. This time, Go Daddy has me cheering them on even after our website meltdown. Even though word on the street was that a malicious hacker with something to prove took down the company’s servers, the company worked quickly to fix the problem. Then, on Wednesday morning, the email inboxes of those affected by the shut-down were greeted with an apology and a credit for one-month of services for each active site hosted by Go Daddy. Sweet!
Not only was the deal a pretty nice gesture, but the email was worded so well, you just couldn’t stay mad. Go Daddy CEO Scott Wagner set a PR example for all of us to follow by immediately apologizing and admitting fault without pointing fingers. Even more impressive is the fact that they could have blamed the hacker taking credit for the shut down, but instead claimed the problem was in its own network. “We let you down and we know it,” Wagner said in the email.
Bravo for responding to a crisis situation a way that creates empathy for your brand. It’s okay Go Daddy – we forgive you!
