GoDaddy Back Online After Massive Cyber-Attack

After suffering from a huge denial-of-service attack yesterday, which shut down millions of websites and email addresses, DNS host GoDaddy.com is finally live again after transferring its own Domain Name Servers to competing hosting site, VeriSign.

Problems were reported on Monday evening (BST), with many users complaining that their favourite websites had been disrupted. GoDaddy responded by looking into the attacks, which were originally believed to be the work of online hacking collective, Anonymous.

Shortly afterward, however, a Twitter user with the name @AnonymousOwn3r claimed sole responsibility for the attacks, tweeting that he'd "like to test how the cyber security is."

Although he stated that he was not "anti-GoDaddy", the lone hacker (who claimed to be from Brazil) continued to disrupt GoDaddy's servers throughout Monday afternoon, forcing the hosting giant to transfer their DNS data over to Verisign, their closest competitor in the domain registration market.

No exact figures have appeared as to how many websites and email accounts have been affected by the attack, but several companies have stated that they will no longer host their websites through GoDaddy.

Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, told TechCrunch that hosting his task-management app on GoDaddy had been "a poorly thought-out decision, made by me, at the very beginning of the company." He went on to confirm that "we've already had it on our task list to migrate [and] this morning's outage will certainly hasten that departure."

Despite @AnonymousOwn3r claiming responsibility, no official comment on what caused these attacks has been made by either GoDaddy or VeriSign. According to a DNS search made by Wired, GoDaddy's servers continued to be hosted on Verisign.