According to many customers, sites hosted by major web host and domain registrar GoDaddy went down. According to the official GoDaddy Twitter account the company is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it. Customers complained that GoDaddy hosted e-mail accounts are down as well, along with GoDaddy phone service and all sites using GoDaddy’s DNS service.

A member of Anonymous known as AnonymousOwn3r is claiming responsibility, and makes it clear this is not an Anonymous collective action.

[adsenseyu1]

The person behind the Twitter account @AnonymousOwn3r took responsibility for the attack and said all of GoDaddy’s servers were knocked out with what is known as a distributed denial of service attack, or DDoS attack, in which a site is flooded with traffic until it collapses under the load.

“When I do some DDoS attack, I like to let it down by many days,” the person claiming responsibility said on Twitter. “It can last one hour or one month.”

This person said that he had conducted the attack alone and that it was not part of a broader Anonymous campaign. GoDaddy briefly became an target of Anonymous last December for its initial support of the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, a Congressional bill that would have made it possible for copyright owners to seek court orders to take sites offline for practicing or aiding piracy. GoDaddy withdrew its support of the bill after customers began transferring their Web sites to its competitors and hackers threatened to attack it.

But one of the Twitter accounts most frequently associated with Anonymous, @AnonyOps, distanced the group from Monday’s attack and said it was the work of one individual. “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,” the Twitter post said.

AnonymousOwn3r’s bio reads “Security leader of #Anonymous (~Official member~).” The individual claims to be from Brazil, and hasn’t issued a statement as to why GoDaddy was targeted.

Last year GoDaddy was pressured into opposing SOPA as customers transferred domains off the service, and the company has been the center of a few other controversies. However, AnonymousOwn3r  tweeted “I’m not anti go daddy, you guys will undestand because i did this attack.”