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A number of websites hosted by GoDaddy were blasted offline this week in a distributed denial-of-service attack.

The company's servers in Europe struggled under the volley on Monday afternoon and continued to suffer until yesterday evening after GoDaddy installed network traffic filters to block the assaults.

UK customers tweeted as early as 3.35pm on Monday that GoDaddy's systems seemed to be under strain:

Godaddy servers in Europe have a problem, if your site is down then that's probably the reason.

— David Batty (@DavidBatty) March 11, 2013

Some websites in the US were also affected. A GoDaddy user in Arizona, US, complained:

ugh, site's down again, have only myself to blame - should have left @godaddy the last time I had issues. 6.5 yr customer/victim....so tired

— Eric Oszakiewski (@eoszak) March 11, 2013

Cedar Coleman, senior director of web hosting operations at the firm, told The Reg that service was intermittent in Europe.

"Customers were temporarily unable to reach their websites due to a large distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in our EU hosting server environment. Filters were immediately applied to mitigate the situation and service was restored at 7.40pm," he said. "At this time all service has been restored. The Go Daddy 24/7 security operation centre continues to monitor the situation and is committed to making the internet a safe place for our customers."

Coleman didn't say if anyone had claimed responsibility for the DDoS attack.

GoDaddy was downed for a day in September last year in what was claimed by one lone hacker as a DDoS attack. The firm said that service outage was "not caused by external influences" but was actually an internal problem. ®

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