On Friday, December 12, 2025, GoDaddy experienced a temporary interruption of Anycast access to its authoritative domain name services due to inadvertent execution of a command that affected access for 8 minutes. We detected and reversed the command immediately. The outage began at 21:20 GMT and service was restored at 21:28 GMT.
This incident affected all GoDaddy authoritative DNS services, resulting in DNS queries for GoDaddy-managed domains to fail temporarily. Because DNS responses are widely cached, the impact was largely limited to users who needed a fresh DNS lookup.
To understand this incident, it helps to revisit how modern DNS infrastructure operates. Authoritative DNS is the system responsible for providing the definitive answer about how to reach online sites associated with a domain name. When you type a website address, a DNS resolver somewhere needs to ask the associated authoritative servers where to find that domain. Anycast routing is a network addressing method where the same IP address exists in multiple locations worldwide. Traffic is automatically routed to the topologically nearest server, providing redundancy and performance benefits. This is one reason why our DNS typically is so resilient: a problem in one location doesn't usually affect global availability.
DNS relies heavily on caching at multiple levels throughout the internet. Public DNS resolvers and ISP resolvers, which handle a significant portion of open resolver traffic, maintain extensive caches of domain information. Similarly, browsers and operating systems cache DNS responses. If you or others had recently visited a GoDaddy-hosted domain before the incident, your device or ISP likely had the answer cached and continued working normally. Each DNS record has a time to live value that determines how long it can be cached. Once this expires, a fresh lookup is needed.
During the 8-minute window, users who needed a fresh DNS lookup were affected. This created a variable impact pattern where some users experienced no issues while others temporarily couldn't access certain websites or services.
When service was restored, recovery followed normal internet routing patterns. Our Anycast network became available again, internet routing tables updated to reflect the restored paths, and DNS resolvers could once again reach our authoritative servers. Most users saw service restoration within minutes of the fix, though some may have experienced slightly longer resolution times depending on their location and DNS resolver configuration.
GoDaddy takes its responsibility as a provider of authoritative DNS services seriously. We have identified the root cause of this incident and are implementing procedural, technical, and monitoring improvements to avoid a similar incident in the future. We remain committed to continually working to provide a reliable, resilient DNS infrastructure.
