'Anonymous' hacking shuts down ALL websites hosted by GoDaddy including thousands of small businesses

Web hosting giant hacked and all of the websites run through GoDaddy were shut down temporarily as a result of Monday's attack
The company is still trying to restore service

PUBLISHED: 17:36 EST, 10 September 2012 | UPDATED: 17:38 EST, 10 September 2012

Thousands and possibly millions of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com were down Monday, causing trouble for the mainly small businesses that rely on the service.

A Twitter feed that claims to be affiliated with the 'Anonymous' hacker group says it was behind the outage, but this couldn't be confirmed by the Associated Press.

FoxNews identified the hacker as Anup Ghosh after he emailed the site and they verified his identity through various Twitter claims.

Public image: Racecar driver Danica Patrick is the spokeswoman for the brand and appears in their commercials

'This is yet another example of how anyone with an agenda can take down large portions of the Internet with really cheap, off-the-shelf tools,' he told the site.

The question of internet security is one that Ghosh appears to know well as he is thought to be a chief scientist with Invincea, a security company specializing in cyber protection.

Another Twitter account, known to be associated with Anonymous, suggested the first one was just taking advantage of an outage it had nothing to do with.

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The attack was a distributed denial of service (DDoS) which temporarily shuts down all of the websites affiliated with the key host, who in this case was GoDaddy.

GoDaddy spokeswoman Elizabeth Driscoll said that as of 6pm the company was still investigating the cause and working to restore service.

The company has been using it's Twitter feed to speak to concerned customers, updating throughout the day Monday ever since the attack happened around 1pm.

Explanation: GoDaddy, which hosts an estimated 5 million different websites, said that they were flooded with emails from concerned customers following the disruption on Monday afternoon

Updates: Initially a hacker associated with Anonymous took credit for the attack, but the company has not released any information about the details of the hack yet publicly

GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5 million websites, mostly for small businesses. Websites that were complaining on Twitter about outages included MixForSale.com, which sells accessories with Japanese animation themes, and YouWatch.org, a video-sharing site.

The outage began shortly after 1 p.m. EDT, Driscoll said.

Kenneth Borg, who works in a Long Beach, Calif., screen printing business, said fresnodogprints.com and two other sites were down. Their email addresses weren't working either.

'We run our entire business through websites and emails, so everything's down today,' Mr Borg said.

The business even takes orders from its two physical stores through the Web, so clerks had to use their personal email addresses to send in orders to the printing shop, causing an administrative headache, Mr Borg said.

Mr Borg said he could empathize to some extent with the hacker, if one was involved. GoDaddy was a target for 'hacktivists' early this year, when it supported a copyright bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act.

Movie and music studios had backed the changes, but critics say they would result in censorship and discourage Internet innovation.

'I'm definitely one for upsetting the establishment in some cases, and I understand that if he's going after GoDaddy, he may have had many reasons for doing that,' Mr Borg said.

'But I don't think he realized that he was affecting so many small businesses, and not just a major company.'