GoDaddy denies outage was "hack" attack GoDaddy, the web hosting firm, said that Monday's widespread outage, which affected thousands of websites, was caused by technical difficulties, not a hacking attack as had been suggested. A large proportion of GoDaddy's millions of customers, which are mainly small businesses and personal account holders in the US, saw their websites and email systems rendered inaccessible for up to six hours between 10am and 4pm Pacific time. Scott Wagner, GoDaddy's interim chief executive, on Tuesday apologised for what he described as customers" "intermittent service outages," saying that the company had no one to blame but itself. One individual on Twitter, professing to be a hacker under the Anonymous banner, had claimed he had brought down the GoDaddy domain-name server network by flooding it with more traffic than it could handle, known as a denial of service attack. However, this was quickly denied by other members of the Anonymous "hacktivist" group. "The service outage was not caused by external influences," Mr Wagner said. "It was not a "hack," and it was not a denial of service attack." Instead, problems with GoDaddy's internal network triggered the downtime. "We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again," said Mr Wagner. At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised. Mr Wagner did not say how many customers were affected but insisted that GoDaddy had provided "99.999 per cent" reliability in the past. "This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves," he said. We have let our customers down and we know it. However, some customers have already said they will leave GoDaddy for rival service providers, several of whom have made special offers to capitalise on their competitor's misfortune. This morning was the last straw. I'm leaving GoDaddy," wrote Kevin Stephens, ‏a California-based entrepreneur, on Twitter on Monday. Dustin Moskovitz, the Facebook co-founder who now runs Asana, an online collaboration service, wrote on the question-and-answer site Quora that the outage "will certainly hasten that departure" from GoDaddy, which he had already planned. GoDaddy - which registers more domain names than any other provider, generating more than $1bn in annual revenues last year - is no stranger to criticism. Its regular Super Bowl advertisements, which often feature buxom women, have been branded sexist, while Bob Parsons, its founder and executive chairman, courted controversy when he posted an online video showing him posing next to an elephant he had shot. Its executives" support for proposed US legislation to counter piracy, which was heavily criticised by the likes of Facebook and Google, also proved unpopular with some internet libertarians late last year. Wikipedia was one of several sites switching to another service provider in protest at GoDaddy's backing for the Stop Online Piracy Act. GoDaddy, founded in the late 1990s, was acquired by private-equity firms KKR, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures for a reported $2.25bn in 2011.