LEE COUNTY, Fl. - Millions of websites targeted by hackers on a mission.  The group "Anonymous" took down godaddy.com.  That left small businesses and their customers who use that Internet service in the dark for more than four hours Monday.

Godaddy.com is an Internet domain registry.  A lot of businesses use their services to create their websites.  It's back up and running Monday night.  But when godaddy.com got hacked, it froze up internet communication.

"It said something along the lines of error fetching data," says Kirsten O'Donnell.

O'Donnell with Goodwill Industries says that's all you saw for about four hours Monday when you visited goodwillswfl.org.  Se says on a good day, they get about 1,200 page views on any of their three websites.  So this hacking not only created problems for them but also for the people they serve.

"A lot of those individuals are often folks who are looking for our mission services... so these are people who may be making a special trip to the library, one of our job link centers just to be able to get Internet access so it's frustrating to know that they tried to view our site and couldn't get onto it," she says.

Goodwill Industries in Southwest Florida along with millions of others, use godaddy.com.  Hackers overloaded the Internet domain registry's servers with so much traffic, they couldn't keep up.

"It's a black eye for godaddy because not only do a lot of people rely on them to register domain names but for email and web hosting and while they're down these companies are out of business or communication," says Thomas Foreman, senior network engineer with The Client Server.

O'Donnell says ironically, they switched to godaddy last year to avoid an outage like this one

"It just goes to show you that no matter big a company is, there's always the possibility," she adds.

WINK News dot com was also affected Monday.  There was no loss of customer information like credit card numbers or passwords. 
Godaddy says it's investigating how the breach happened.