Following a day-long Domain Name Service server outage, web hosting provider GoDaddy is letting its competitor, VeriSign, host its DNS servers.

On Monday afternoon – about four hours after it was knocked offline – GoDaddy's administrators made a change to the company's DNS records, indicating that they were shifting control of the servers from GoDaddy to VeriSign. The change made VeriSign's servers the DNS servers for the Godaddy.com domain, which had been knocked offline as part of the outage. However, it did not affect companies that had purchased DNS services from Godaddy.

GoDaddy has not explained the source of its widespread outage which knocked websites and e-mail users offline Monday. "We are experiencing intermittent outages. This is impacting our site and some customers' sites," GoDaddy said in a note sent to customers Monday. "The issue started shortly after 10am PDT."

The outage may have been due to a technical glitch, but a hacker named Anonymousown3r claimed responsibility for the outage. It hasn't been possible to verify this claim.

VeriSign and GoDaddy both sell services designed to ensure that DNS services do not go offline. VeriSign also sells services to protect customers from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks – a favorite technique for leveling internet servers. Although it isn't clear what took GoDaddy's DNS servers down, the outage appears to be widespread. According to one observer, DNS servers at the company's U.S. data center were hit, but servers in Asia continued to operate normally.

According to Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer with antivirus company F-Secure, the move to VeriSign has a simple explanation: "They are moving to name servers which are not under attack," he said via direct message.

VeriSign and GoDaddy representatives did not respond to messages seeking comment.

This story has been updated to clarify that the move to VeriSign affected only the GoDaddy.com domain and to correct the explanation of the area where VeriSign and GoDaddy compete

Screen Shot: Wired*