Update: GoDaddy has completed the outage investigation with the following statement:

“The service outage was not caused by external influences. It was not a “hack” and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS). We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again.”

We will see what kind of damage to GoDaddy’s reputation in the coming weeks. These events leaves customers with two conclusions; 1. Any service can have unexpected down time. 2. Never trust Anonymous.

GoDaddy is suffering from a major outage due to an attack, possibly by a group called ‘Anonymous’ today. The outage is affecting millions of websites, leaving many small businesses completely down. You can check on your sites’ progress here.

Anonymous as a group is not taking responsibility, however a single member named “AnonymousOwn3r” claims he is solely responsible for the attack and outage:

“…the attack is not coming from Anonymous collective, the attack it’s coming only from me.”

No official comments on why the attack has taken place, though speculation is pointing to GoDaddys support of SOPA earlier this year.

GoDaddy is assuring all users they are doing everything they can to get all services back online.

“Update: Still working on it, but we’re making progress. Some service has already been restored. Stick with us.” GoDaddy commented via Twitter.

Many large companies have suffered from attacks this year, a good reminder bigger is not always better. We have seen time and time again this year huge companies can’t always protect your information, to better protect yourself, change passwords regularly and never share login credentials. If you find yourself a victim CircleClick has written a handy guide about online attacks and what to do.

With so many users and company websites being affected by the outage, I wonder how many users will stay with GoDaddy knowing a single hacker can bring the web hosting company to a halt. While one companies loss is another’s gain, Host Gator is currently offering 30% off all hosting with the promo code “godaddyisdown“.