Businesses using 123-Reg's web hosting service were knocked offline on Wednesday evening following a reported distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

123-Reg is the UK's largest domain provider hosting over 1.4 million websites. The company said it was hit by a DDoS style attack that caused disruption to some customers on its shared hosting packages.

DDoS attacks typically use a botnet of computers in a co-ordinated attack, driving web traffic to a particular website. The attack appeared to cause patchy service for websites hosted by the company for several hours with many customers taking to Twitter to vent their frustration.

UK games and mobile apps start-up Greedy Goblin Games (@GreedyGoblins) tweeted 123-Reg: "It appears your shared hosting servers are down. Can access FTP but not websites".

While IT consultant @thepaulturvey tweeted: "Is there a problem with 123-Reg shared hosting? Multiple sites not responding".

123-Reg support staff told one UK website owner: "There has been a DDOS type of attack targeting a website from our shared hosting platform which unfortunately affected some of our customers. Our system administrators have contained the attack and the connectivity issues should shortly be resolved".

Update: I've received the following statement from 123-Reg confirming the attack.

123-Reg did experience a DDoS attack targeted against one particular customer domain. It was a sustained attack which we monitored closely over the course of several hours. The attack itself was from 823 different IP addresses globally. This resulted in denigrated service to our hosting platform, meaning some customer sites were running slower, but no sites were taken offline as a result of this attack. Customer impact measured in terms of support queries was minimal -- and likewise our social platforms saw a handful of comments -- which are being addressed on a one to one basis via our support teams.

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