NEW YORK: Thousands and possibly millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com went down for several hours 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 was not confirmed. A 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 shortly after 1 p.m. EDT. By around 5:50 p.m., the GoDaddy.com website and sites hosted by the company were back up.
Driscoll had said the company was investigating.
GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5 million websites, mostly for small businesses.
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 say they would result in censorship and discourage innovation.
“I’m definitely one for upsetting the establishment in some cases, and I understand that if [a hacker is] going after GoDaddy, he may have had many reasons for doing that,” said Kenneth Borg, who works in a Long Beach, Calif., screen- printing business. “But I don’t think he realized that he was affecting so many small businesses, and not just a major company.”