Note: An update to this story has been posted here.
Many users of GoDaddy's web hosting services found their websites down and their e-mail not going through on Monday afternoon, apparently following a failure of the company's Domain Name Service servers.
GoDaddy announced the problems around 11 a.m. Pacific with a short Twitter message, saying: "We're aware of the trouble people are having with our site. We're working on it."
At the same time, posters to the Outages mailing list were reporting that GoDaddy's DNS servers -- the computers that tell, among other things, internet browsers where to find web servers -- had been knocked offline.
GoDaddy's website was offline too. After a 14-minute wait, a GoDaddy tech support technician confirmed that the companies services hadn't been working Monday, but he called the failure "intermittent," before referring inquiries to GoDaddy's public relations department. GoDaddy PR didn't return messages.
GoDaddy manages 5 million hosting accounts. It was not immediately clear how many of them were offline, but according to forum posts and GoDaddy's own Twitter feed, many customers are affected, after DNS servers in North America were knocked offline.
About an hour after its original post, GoDaddy said: "So many messages, can't get to you all... Sorry to hear all your frustration. We're working feverishly to resolve as soon as possible."
By 1 p.m., GoDaddy said on Twitter that it was restoring some service.
An anonymous hacker named Anonymousown3r claimed responsibility for the outage, but it wasn't immediately possible to verify this claim.
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Logo: GoDaddy*
