GoDaddy goes dark: 'Anonymous' claims hack on millions of websites

Update (below): GoDaddy takes blame for outage

An unknown person claiming affiliation with the amorphous protest movement "Anonymous" took responsibility on Monday for hacking website host GoDaddy.com, the Internet's largest domain register, shortly after millions of sites serviced by the company went dark.

The outage affected all sites that are hosted with GoDaddy or use GoDaddy domain services. GoDaddy email and phone services were down as well.

While the official "Anonymous" channels did not claim the attack, they did promote it. Another individual, posting on Twitter under the name "AnonymousOwn3r," ultimately took responsibility.

"Hello everyone who wanna me to put 99% of the global Internet in #tangodown?" the account asked. "I'm taking godaddy down because well i'd like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now," the nameless hacker explained.

GoDaddy confirmed the outage a short while later, saying: "We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it. A second update hours later apologized to all the people writing in and promised that GoDaddy's techs were "working feverishly" to fix the problem. The company's own website and support line also appeared to be down nearly three hours after GoDaddy confirmed the outage.

GoDaddy became the target of the Internet's ire last year after the company came out in favor of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), an unpopular series of Internet regulations proposed in the U.S. House that would have fundamentally changed the structure of the Internet and implemented widespread censorship in the name of protecting intellectual property rights. The company backtracked on supporting SOPA after several high-profile websites switched providers amid a sustained online protest encouraging GoDaddy customers to change hosts.

Update: GoDaddy takes blame for outage

GoDaddy said on Tuesday, Sept. 11, that an outage which affected millions of websites was the result of "internal network events" and not a hack, as previously claimed. The outage lasted about four hours before service was restored.

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Photo: Stephen C. Webster, creative commons licensed.