GoDaddy-hosted websites go offline; hackers claim responsibility
Websites hosted by Internet domain registrar GoDaddy were knocked offline Monday as a hacker group claimed responsibility for the disruption.
GoDaddy in Scottsdale, Ariz., is one of the nation’s largest Web hosting companies, with more than 5 million clients. It declined to say how many websites went down or what caused them to crash.
“GoDaddy did experience some intermittent outages, and it impacted our site and some customer sites,” spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said. “We’re working to restore all services. Some are already back online.”
Driscoll said the outages began shortly after 10 a.m. PDT, and they may have caused millions of GoDaddy-hosted websites to go offline.
Some customers who don’t have websites hosted by GoDaddy but used the company to register their Internet domain names also reported problems. Some users were not being directed to the website that had been registered with GoDaddy.
“My sites are down, but so are millions of struggling small biz owners,” said a user named Darnell Clayton on Twitter, who also said he registered his domain with the company but doesn’t use GoDaddy for hosting.
The hacker group Anonymous has claimed responsibility for taking the websites down, but GoDaddy’s Driscoll said she could not confirm the claim.
Multiple members of Anonymous have said they were behind the attack, but none of those claims has been verified. It also is unclear what kind of attack led to the massive problem.
GoDaddy said users can follow it on Twitter or its website for updates.
