Yesterday popular hosting provider GoDaddy suffered a major, multi-hour outage that the company claims was due to an internal network error (and not a DDoS attack by a member of Anonymous).
GoDaddy reportedly handles millions of domain names so the outage affected a massive number of people, many of whom turned to Twitter to find information and to vent. Twitter search and analytics company Topsy tracked mentions of the company, and has created sentiment analysis graph.
Here’s a graph of mentions of GoDaddy on Twitter:
According to Topsy, that huge spike was apparently caused by this Tweet:
And here’s a graph of Topsy’s sentiment analysis — based on the number of positive versus negative mentions on Twitter — of GoDaddy during the outage:
Sentiment analysis isn’t an exact science, but with sentiment this overwhelmingly negative there’s not much room for error unless anti-Anonymous sentiment is being mistaken for anti-GoDaddy sentiment.
It will be more interesting to see when and by how much the sentiment improves in coming weeks.
Topsy offers a paid service for companies to track their Twitter mentions and brand sentiment — it’s actually the same tool that powers Twitter Political Index. The company competes with other social media analytics companies such as Radian6 and Lithium.
Photo by Tambako The Jaguar / CC