The company released a statement outlining the circumstances, stating "about 3am Pacific, a Denial Of Service attack/ HUGE influx if DNS queries bombarded our main co-lo facility in Seattle".
The two companies did have a substantial level of redundancy built into their network, but the attack was too overpowering "...the downtime at our co-lo in Seattle caused all DNS to be directed to our east coast facility. The facility also was brought down by the volume in traffic".
The statement, to some degree, even made light of the event.
"...trying to find a Cisco PIX 525 (a type of firewall) at 4:30pm is tough," it said.
Normal service has been restored to MyDomain and NamesDirect customers.
Being one of the first engineers to put that system together, it was built for redundancy, so even a mass DoS wouldn't take it down all together