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Thousands and possibly millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com went down for several hours on Monday, causing trouble for the mainly small businesses that rely on the service.
A Twitter feed that claimed to be affiliated with the Anonymous hacker group said it was behind the outage, but that couldn't be confirmed. Another Twitter account, known to be associated with Anonymous, suggested the first one was just taking advantage of an outage it had nothing to do with.
GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said the outage began at around 6.25pm BST. By around 10.43pm, BST, the GoDaddy.com website was back up and service was restored for the bulk of its mainly US customers.
GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5m websites, mostly for small businesses. Websites that were complaining on Twitter about outages included MixForSale.com, which sells accessories with Japanese animation themes, and YouWatch.org, a video-sharing site.
Catherine Grison, an interior designer in San Francisco who operates YourFrenchAccent.com, said she had to stop sending emails containing her website link during the outage. The site is where she displays her portfolio of work.
"If I have no visuals I have nothing left except the accent," said Grison, a native of Paris. She said she was already shopping around for another site host because she was unhappy with GoDaddy's customer service.
Earlier, Kenneth Borg, who works in a Long Beach, California, screen printing business, said fresnodogprints.com and two other sites were down. Their email addresses were also not working.
"We run our entire business through websites and emails," Borg said.
Borg said he could empathise to some extent with a potential hacker. GoDaddy was a target for "hacktivists" early this year, when it supported a copyright bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Movie and music studios had backed the changes, but critics said they would result in censorship and discourage internet innovation.
"I'm definitely one for upsetting the establishment in some cases, and I understand that if he's going after GoDaddy, he may have had many reasons for doing that," Borg said. "But I don't think he realised that he was affecting so many small businesses, and not just a major company."[GuardianUK]
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