For six hours on Monday afternoon, GoDaddy.com, the largest domain name provider on the internet, went offline. The outage also took all of the thousands of websites that Go Daddy hosts offline, inconveniencing people all over the world. Typically, in the aftermath of this kind of event, many commentators would be scrambling for answers. However, this time they didn't have to wait long as a hacker who aligned himself with the high-profile Anonymous group took credit for the event via the @AnonymousOwn3r Twitter handle.

While engineers at Go Daddy worked hard to restore the service, it was still about six hours before everything was back up and running.

The owner of another Anonymous-related Twitter account, @AnonyOps, released a few tweets distancing the Go Daddy outage from the group of activist hackers.

In a direct message, he suggested that the move was unwise, telling a reporter, "He's either a newbie to activism and cutting his teeth by doing this, which is misguided, or he's trying to give Anons a bad reputation."

Go Daddy CEO Scott Wagner released a statement on the company's behalf yesterday, claiming that the outage was not due to hacking or external influences at all, but rather "a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables."

Through the @AnonymousOwn3r account, the apparent hacker continually insisted that he was in fact responsible for the activity. We may never know for sure if hacking was behind the GoDaddy outage, or if it was simply due to the network events that Wagner referred to in his statement.

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