Several thousands of web sites reportedly went offline yesterday as hosting provider GoDaddy experienced massive service disruptions. GoDaddy, which claims to be the world's biggest web hosting company, confirmed the problems on its official Twitter account but has not yet stated the cause of the disruptions.

In the wake of the outage, a YouTube video, later deleted, was circulated claiming the attack on behalf of the Anonymous collective as a protest against GoDaddy's support of the SOPA act – the act was defeated earlier in the year. But this claim was later disputed by posts from the @YourAnonNews account which is known to be associated with the hacker group. The hacker who claimed responsibility for the outage, @AnonymousOwn3r, later stated that they had acted on their own in the attack and members of the collective were not involved.

Evidence collected by several publications points to the outage having its roots in DNS problems and not being universal for all users of the service, depending on their physical location. Ars Technica reported that some of their reporters could reach parts of the GoDaddy network when changing their DNS settings.

According to statements by the hosting company, normal service has now been restored across all web sites hosted by GoDaddy after the company moved some of its DNS hosting to competitor Verisign.