Small Business Owners Direct Frustration Toward Anonymous for Alleged Hack of GoDaddy Sites

Thousands -- possibly millions -- of websites hosted by GoDaddy.com are down. A faction of the hacktivist collective Anonymous is claiming responsibility, but the real reason for the outage is unclear.

What is clear by taking a glance at the tweets directed toward the Twitter handle @AnonymousOwn3r is that some business owners using GoDaddy.com to host their sites are upset. Here is just a sampling of the tweets from users expressing their confusion and anger toward this Anonymous member:

Even with this Anonymous account claiming responsibility, other factions relating to the loosely connected hacking group are distancing themselves.

Some on Twitter are asking for @AnonymousOwn3r to reveal its motives for taking down GoDaddy.com, if it actually is responsible for the hack.

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

GoDaddy.com alerted users on Twitter that it was aware of the situation. Here is the server's latest Twitter feed with updates:

Update: On Tuesday, GoDaddy has come out to say that neither a hack nor a denial of service attack is what downed its servers yesterday. Interim CEO Scott Wagner said it was the result of "a series of internal network events," not the work of Anonymous or other hackers. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report.