One Person Is Claiming Credit for GoDaddy's Massive Outage

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If the website you're trying to access won't load, chances are it's a GoDaddy joint that's been taken offline in a massive hack* for which one person is claiming responsibility. The domain registrar acknowledged in a tweet that it was offline on Monday, and The Next Web reported the site's DNS servers had been disabled as well, "which means GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, and lots more." GoDaddy hosted more than 45 million domain names as of 2010, according to DomainSherpa. Someone tweeting with the handle @AnonymousOwn3r claimed responsibility for the attack on Monday, saying in a tweet that he or she had taken down GoDaddy's servers "bacause well i'd like to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now." @AnonymousOwn3r's profile identifies the account holder as the "security leader of Anonymous" and an "Anonymous official member." There's not much information available yet about what happened, but GoDaddy tweets that it's "working feverishly to resolve as soon as possible."

*GoDaddy said in a press release on Tuesday that the outage wasn't a hack at all, but a breakdown of its equipment. We'll have more soon.

Update (5:19 p.m. EDT): GoDaddy is tweeting that it's "making progress" on fixing its outage, but the site and its servers are still down. Meanwhile, GigaOm tracked down the owner of a startup that tracks Kickstarter success, who says the outage ruined his site's launch, which is the kind of story this outage is likely to spawn repeatedly until the service is back up.

Update (3:38 p.m. EDT): Some more established Anonymous Twitter accounts, including @AnonyOps and @GroupAnon aren't backing @AnonymousOwn3r's claim that he represents the hacking collective. @GroupAnon seems particularly unimpressed: