Millions of websites hosted by Godaddy.com were taken down yesterday for a couple of hours before the services started to come back online in the afternoon. A hacker who was apparently associated with the Anonymous group took responsibility on Twitter.com. Another Twitter account associated with the group has disputed the claim however.

The exact number of websites that were affected has not been made public, but potentially millions of websites could have experienced downtime due to the breach. Many of small businesses lost connectivity however.

GJSentinel added “Email and website service was restored for the wineries by 4 p.m. Monday, as well as for other local companies who temporarily lost service, including Hilltop, Atlasta Solar, Rocky Mountain Health Plans and the ticket-selling site for this weekend’s Colorado Mountain Winefest. Michelle Walker, Rocky Mountain Health Plans director of sales administration, said the health insurance-provider first noticed the problem at 8 a.m. Monday. The business has price-quoting tools on sites hosted by GoDaddy.com that the company’s insurance agents were unable to access during the outage. Sales and support team employees had to feed agents the data they needed over the phone throughout the day and answer customer questions with information that otherwise would have been available on Rocky Mountain Health Plans’ site.”

On Twitter, user @AnonymousOwn3r posted, “the attack is not coming from Anonymous coletive [sic] , the attack it's coming only from me” and that the the action is being carried out “to test how the cyber security is safe and for more reasons that i can not talk now.”

Kitguru says: Anonymous continue to distance themselves from the attack.

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