Why does a site have no domain authority?

[optimalwebinc]

A website was built and launched eight months ago, and their domain authority is 1.  When a site has been live for a while and has such a low DA, what's causing it?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

No backlinks? Blocking crawler?

[optimalwebinc]

The crawler isn't blocked; we checked that first.  According to SEOmoz and Ahrefs, there's zero backlinks, but it does have some social shares.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Well there ya have it. DA is mostly based off the authority and quantity of a sites backlinks.

[optimalwebinc]

Face palm ;).  Thanks, Oleg.