by Roger Yu, USA TODAY
GoDaddy, a Web-hosting and domain-registration company, said services have been restored for most of its customers after widespread outages on Monday.
"At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised," the company said in an announcement on its website.
The outages of hosted sites started around 1 p.m. ET on Monday, but GoDaddy was still in operation then. But by late afternoon, the company closed its website.
Twitter accounts believed associated with hacking group Anonymous claimed responsibility. GoDaddy.com says the web hosting outage was due to internal problems, not an attack by hackers.
GoDaddy, which hosts more than 5 million sites, has been a subject of hackers' ire because it publicly supported federal anti-piracy legislation called the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA.
Several prominent opponents of the measure argued that the bill would stifle innovation and removed their domains from GoDaddy. "By using/supporting GoDaddy, you are supporting censorship of the Internet," read a message posted Monday by a Twitter account believed to be affiliated with Anonymous.
Kenneth Borg, who works in a Long Beach screen-printing business, told the Associated Press on Monday that FresnoDogPrints.com and two other sites were down. "We run our entire business through websites and e-mails, so everything's down today," Borg said.
"I'm definitely one for upsetting the establishment in some cases, and I understand that if (the hacker is) going after GoDaddy, he may have had many reasons for doing that," Borg said. "But I don't think he realized that he was affecting so many small businesses."
Contributing: Julia Ryan; The Associated Press
Previous story
by Peter Svensson, USA TODAY
NEW YORK (AP) Thousands and possibly millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com were down Monday, causing trouble for the mainly small businesses that rely on the service.
A Twitter feed that claims to be affiliated with the "Anonymous" hacker group says it was behind the outage, but this couldnâ??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 company was still investigating the cause and working to restore service.
GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5 million 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 outage began shortly after 1 p.m. EDT, Driscoll said.
Kenneth Borg, who works in a Long Beach, Calif., screen printing business, said fresnodogprints.com and two other sites were down. Their email addresses werenâ??t working either.
"We run our entire business through websites and emails, so everythingâ??s down today," Borg said.
The business even takes orders from its two physical stores through the Web, so clerks had to use their personal email addresses to send in orders to the printing shop, causing an administrative headache, Borg said.
Borg said he could empathize to some extent with the hacker, if one was involved. GoDaddy was a target for "hacktivists" early this year, when it supported a copyright bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act. Movie and music studios had backed the changes, but critics say they would result in censorship and discourage Internet innovation.
"Iâ??m definitely one for upsetting the establishment in some cases, and I understand that if heâ??s going after GoDaddy, he may have had many reasons for doing that," Borg said. "But I donâ??t think he realized that he was affecting so many small businesses, and not just a major company."
Copyright 2012 USA TODAY