GoDaddy offline, hacker AnonymousOwn3r takes credit

It seemed possible millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy were temporarily taken down by one hacker who calls him or herself AnonymousOwn3r.

"Some services are back online," GoDaddy told CBS News earlier in the day. "It's been intermittent and impacted our site and some of our customer sites. It started at about 10 a.m. PT and we are working to restore all service."

However, GoDaddy said on Tuesday that the outage was caused by internal problems, not hackers, according to the Associated Press. The outage lasted for four hours and affected many small-business sites.

Anup Ghosh, chief scientist of the security company Invincea, claimed GoDaddy was hit by a basic distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Ghosh told FOX, “This is yet another example of how anyone with an agenda can take down large portions of the Internet with really cheap, off-the-shelf tools."

On Monday afternoon GoDaddy began reporting technical difficulties. One of its tweets read:

AnonymousOwn3r offered a reason for the attack, according to FOX. "I'm taking GoDaddy down bacause well i'd like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now."

TechCrunch speculated the attack may be related to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

"Last year GoDaddy was pressured into opposing SOPA as customers transferred domains off the service, and the company has been the center of a few other controversies," wrote TechCrunch.

However, TechCrunch points out AnonymousOwn3r already tweeted, “I’m not anti go daddy, you guys will understand because i did this attack.”

The AP noted that a Twitter account claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous took credit for the outage, while another account known to be associated with Anonymous said the first was just taking advantage of an outage it was not responsible for.

Early today GoDaddy tweeted: