GoDaddy outage takes out websites

NEW YORK — 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 this 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 shortly after 11 a.m. MDT. By around 3:50 p.m. MDT, the GoDaddy.com website and sites hosted by the company were back up and running. Driscoll had said the company was investigating the cause.

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.

Catherine Grison, an interior designer in San Francisco who operates the site YourFrenchAccent.com, said she had to stop sending emails with her website link in them while the outage was ongoing. The site is where she displays her portfolio of work.

"If I have no visuals I have nothing left except the accent," said Grison, a native of Paris. She said she was already shopping around for another site host because she was unhappy with GoDaddy's customer service.

Earlier, Kenneth Borg, who works in a Long Beach, Calif., screen printing business, said fresnodogprints.com and two other sites were down. Their email addresses weren't working either.

"We run our entire business through websites and emails," Borg said.