As you may or may not have heard, the world’s “number one domain registrar” and one of the Alexa top 100 websites in the world, Godaddy.com, has been down for several hours. Not only that, most of the 35 million websites and e-mail accounts hosted with GoDaddy have been inaccessible as well.

It’s been speculated that the takedown occurred at the hands of a hacker or group of hackers, potentially associated with the infamous Anonymous group. This individual or group unleashed what’s called a DDOS or distributed denial of service attack on GoDaddy. The debacle begs the question: what exactly is a DDOS attack and how does it happen?