GoDaddy, one of the world's largest website providers and domain registrars, has suffered a major outage. One hacker thought to be connected with Anonymous is claiming responsibility for the alleged 'attack.'

The cause and the true scale of the outage is unknown. Many customers and users have taken to social networking sites, such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, to complain that the sites they operate or are trying to access are not loading. Some are complaining that their email communications are affected, such as individual email accounts and servers.

GoDaddy, which says it is the world's largest hosting provider of secure websites with more than 53 million registered domain names, has yet to confirm the cause of the apparent outage, but said on Twitter that it was "working on" getting the service back up and running.

GoDaddy's main website was also down for a brief period. In a message on one of its pages, the company said:

We are experiencing problems. We understand this is impacting some customers and we take this situation very seriously. Everyone at GoDaddy.com is working to restore all sites affected by this outage as soon as possible.
According to one source speaking to ZDNet, GoDaddy's DNS servers are not resolving forcing many websites offline. In many cases, even if the site is not hosted by GoDaddy itself, the DNS servers are down and cannot point the user to the correct page.

Some parts of the website appeared to be working again at 4 p.m. ET. At just after 6 p.m. ET, GoDaddy said in a tweet that it was "still working" on the ongoing issues and that the firm was "making progress."