GoDaddy has confirmed that a number of customer web sites and email accounts went down earlier Monday afternoon.
“Hey all. We’re aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We’re working on it,” a company rep tweeted. “Some service has already been restored. Stick with us.”
GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll told the Associated Press the outage began shortly after 1 p.m. EDT. By 5:50 p.m. EDT, the GoDaddy.com website and sites hosted by the company were back up and running.
It remained unclear how many sites were actually affected by the outage, although an individual hacker with purported links to Anonymous claimed responsibility for the down time.
”Hello everyone, who [wants] me to 99% of the global Internet in #tangodown?” Anonymous Own3r asked rhetorically on Twitter.
“I’m taking GoDaddy down because I’d like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that I cannot talk about now… It’s not Anonymous [collective], the attack is coming just from me.”
It should be noted that GoDaddy was the target of cyber protests earlier this year after it was discovered that the company supported the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA).
