Lawsuit filed over Go Daddy downtime — Class action
Lawsuit claims seeks damages for downtime on September 10.
Well, that was quick.
The first federal lawsuit seeking class action status has been filed against GoDaddy for its downtime on September 10 (pdf). The outage affected GoDaddy.com and many people who used the firm’s DNS and web hosting services.
The suit was filed by Eric Mitchell, who runs the web site StatedIncomeIsBack.com. He claims Go Daddy failed to “satisfy its guaranteed upload (sic) times for clients’ Domain Name Service (“DNS”), web sites and email accounts…”
Mitchell claims that Go Daddy violated its 99.9% uptime guarantee for hosting. The suit notes that Go Daddy’s services can only be down for 43.2 minutes in a thirty day period to meet the guarantee. He also cites the firm’s 99.999% uptime guarantee for its Premium DNS Manager, a product that it’s not clear if he was using.
Of course, Go Daddy’s guarantees include language that defines what the client is entitled to if the uptime guarantee is not met.
The legal agreement on GoDaddy.com refers to the 99.9% webhosting uptime guarantee and the remedy:
“you may contact Go Daddy and request a credit of 5% of your monthly hosting fee from Go Daddy for that month. The credit may be used only for the purchase of further products and services from Go Daddy, and is exclusive of any applicable taxes.”
For Premium DNS Manager, the guarantee states that clients will get a service credit for two months for any affected services. Still, the terms note that you must open a ticket to request this credit.
Mitchell states that he was only offered a 30% discount off of fresh products or renewals. As stated by the suit, other people were offered account credits but they were not applied automatically. (My reading of Go Daddy’s policies is that credits will not be automatically applied and the client has to request them.)
The plaintiff in this case has a penchant for filing lawsuits whenever a service provider drops the ball. He appears to be the same plaintiff in an action against RIM for a blackberry outage. It’s also the same law firm.
