GoDaddy Restores Service After Anonymous Attack

GoDaddy restored service to most customers late Monday following a major outage reportedly carried out by a member of Anonymous, the Internet registrar said. 

"Most customer hosted sites back online. We're working out the last few kinks for our site & control centers.
 No customer data compromised," GoDaddy tweeted on its official Twitter account at about 8:30 p.m. ET. 

A GoDaddy spokesperson COPYtold PCWorld that the outage started at around 1:25 p.m. and that "services for the bulk of affected customers were restored" at 5:43 p.m.
The GoDaddy.com website was loading properly at PCMag's offices in New York at as of 3:30 p.m. 

A member of Anonymous who goes by the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn3r and describes himself as the "security leader of #Anonymous," took credit for the attack on the domain registrar, famous for its racy television ads in the United States. 

"How long do you guys think i should let http://www.godaddy.com/ under my #tangodown," AnonymousOwn3r wrote. The unknown actor later denied that the GoDaddy takedown was a coordinated effort carried out by Anonymous as a whole. "[T]he attack it's coming only from me," AnonymousOwn3r wrote.
Nor was it clear what AnonymousOwn3r's motive for the attack was, if indeed that person carried it out. The individual's command of English appeared sketchy—one of AnonymousOwn3r's tweets, in which the individual apparently boasted of knocking 52 million sites offline, was written in Portuguese.
The @Anon_Central Twitter feed, however, may have offered a rationale for going after the company, which last year came under fire for not opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), though GoDaddy eventually reversed course on those stances amidst pressure from the Web.