Five Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week

GoDaddy Says Outage Caused By Network Failure, Not Hackers

Web hosting company GoDaddy said an outage that took down several high profile Web sites for several hours was the result of a networking glitch, and wasn't caused by hackers. That was cold comfort to customers who found themselves unable to do business, though.

Scott Wagner, CEO of GoDaddy, apologized for the outage and insisted that its network was not breached from outside.

"The service outage was not caused by external influences," Wagner said in a statement posted on GoDaddy's website. "It was not a 'hack' and it was not a denial of service attack. We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables."

Acer Cancels Alibaba Smartphone Event, At Google's Behest

Acer was planning to hold a press conference this week to announce its CloudMobile A800 smartphone, which runs on Alibaba's Aliyun software, but apparently didn't think through the competitive implications, according to a report from MarketWatch. Alibaba claims Google told Acer it would pull out of its Android partnership with the OEM if it went through with the plan. Whoops!

U.S. Carriers Giving RIM Smaller Space In Retail Stores

As Research In Motion continues working on its BlackBerry 10 OS, U.S. carriers are reducing their RIM displays in retail stores, leading to "meaningfully lower inventory levels" this month compared to last month, Pacific Crest analyst James Faucette told All Things Digital this week.

"In terms of sell-through, we believe that current run rates are roughly one-fifth of those we saw in the United States just eight months ago. Further, we found a meaningful number of carrier retail locations which had not sold a single BlackBerry in over a month," Faucette told All Things Digital.

AT&T Not Allowing Apple FaceTime On All iPhone Data Plans

Verizon and Sprint are allowing customers to use Apple's iPhone FaceTime app over its cellular network, but AT&T is only extending this privilege to customers who agree to sign up for its new shared data plans, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. It's the latest example of AT&T making decisions that are certain to cause grumbling with customers.

Nokia Planning Ethics Review After Smartphone Video Ruse

Nokia continues to feel the fallout from its faked Lumia 920 smartphone video camera stunt. The Finnish mobile device maker has hired an ethics officer to conduct a review of the incident, according to a report from Bloomberg. Nokia apologized last week, but sometimes saying you're sorry just isn't good enough.