GoDaddy Suffers Massive Web Outage, Thousands of Web Sites Down

GoDaddy just can't seem to catch a break. First, it caught a lot of flack for its support of the SOPA Act earlier this year. Now, they have the cyber-terrorists going after them.

The popular web-hosting service fell victim to a massive web outage yesterday afternoon, that has caused thousands of web sites to go down. A member of the "hacktivist" group Anonymous has claimed responsibility for the attack.

Thousands and possibly millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com went down for several hours on 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 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 1:25 p.m. EDT. By around 5:43 p.m. EDT, the GoDaddy.com website was back up and service was restored for the bulk of its customers. Driscoll said there was no loss of sensitive customer information such as credit card data or passwords and that the company was investigating the cause.

I don't know what this person's reasons for attack GoDaddy was, but if his intention was to harm all the small businesses that rely on their websites and GoDaddy to make their money, that is unacceptable. Attacking a website that you believe is doing wrong is one thing. But it's not OK to attack the thousands of innocent businesses that have nothing to do with your personal grudge.