One of the world’s largest web hosts and internet domain registrars GoDaddy.com was down for several hours on Monday, affecting thousands of small businesses.
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.
The web hosting firm later announced: “At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised. We will provide an additional update within the next 24 hours. We want to thank our customers for their patience and support.”