US hosting provider GoDaddy has denied claims that hacktivist group Anonymous lay behind an outage that affected a large number of customers for several hours

"It was not a "hack" and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS)," said GoDaddy interim CEO Scott Wagner in a statement. |We have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables,"

"Once the issues were identified, we took corrective actions to restore services for our customers and GoDaddy.com. We have implemented measures to prevent this from occurring again. At no time was any customer data at risk or were any of our systems compromised."

The outage was linked to Anonymous after a Twitter user with the account name "Anonymous Own3d" claimed responsibility for the outage. The user later claimed to be the "security leader" of Anonymous. 

GoDaddy has since issued a statement denying that the service outage was caused by external factors.

At 10:25 am PT, GoDaddy.com and associated customer services experienced intermittent outages, it said. Services began to be restored for the bulk of affected customers at 2:43 pm Pacific Time.

“At no time was any sensitive customer information, such as credit card data, passwords or names and addresses, compromised. We will provide an additional update within the next 24 hours. We want to thank our customers for their patience and support."

Electronics giant Philips recently dismissed a claimed hacking incident by hackers affiliated with Anonymous as old news after it was discovered that leaked data matched records already in the public domain.