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Neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer down after losing domain

Both Google and GoDaddy say the white supremacist site had violated their terms of service.

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The neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website appeared to be offline late Monday after Google said it would cancel the hate site's domain registration following its migration from GoDaddy earlier in the day. 

Attempts to reach the website, which has been called the "top hate site in America," on the surface web weren't completed and sometimes hung at a screen from Cloudflare, which provides security from DDoS attacks to the site. Other times, the site displayed a message from Andrew Anglin, the site's publisher, saying it was experiencing an outage. 

"We're having an outage," the message read. "It'll be a minute." It also directed readers to the site's channel on Discord, a voice chat program used mostly by gamers, which previously tweeted that it had shut down the server and banned several related accounts.

Google confirmed in an email it was cancelling The Daily Stormer's registration with its Google Domains service for violating the terms of service. Anglin didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The apparent disappearance of The Daily Stormer from the web comes after a weekend of violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the site had helped organize a white supremacist rally. The violence claimed the life of a woman protesting the white supremacists when a car plowed into a group of people.

A post by The Daily Stormer about the incident caused GoDaddy to revoke its domain registration prompting the website to register with Google.

Domain providers direct internet users and search engines to a site's URL.

"We informed The Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service," GoDaddy said in a tweet Sunday, adding in an emailed statement, "If no action is taken after 24 hours, we will cancel the service."

A message from Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based company, is sometimes displayed when trying to access the The Daily Stormer. Cloudflare provides internet performance and security services, but doesn't host content. 

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Without naming The Daily Stormer, Cloudflare acknowledged concerns had been raised over some sites that used its network. "We find the content on some of these sites repugnant," a spokeswoman said in an email. "While our policy is to not comment on any user specifically, we are cooperating with law enforcement in any investigation."

GoDaddy pointed to a hate-filled post on The Daily Stormer that focused on Heather Heyer, the woman killed over the weekend

"Given this latest article comes on the immediate heels of a violent act, we believe this type of article could incite additional violence, which violates our terms of service," a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement. 

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Screenshot by Claire Reilly/CNET

Hours after GoDaddy's statement, a post on The Daily Stormer, which was the subject of a CNET profile last month, said the site had been taken over by hacktivist group Anonymous.

"WE HAVE TAKEN THIS SITE IN THE NAME OF HEATHER HEYER," the post read, adding she was "A VICTIM OF WHITE SUPREMACIST TERRORISM."  

Anonymous acknowledged the post through a Twitter account but didn't confirm it was involved. Instead, the hacking collective suggested it might be an elaborate stunt by Anglin and mooted he might be having difficulty a new domain registrar. 

"This is likely to be the derps from dailystormer engaging in a silly troll to woo their clueless base," reads the tweet from @YourAnonNews. "If we're proven wrong, so be it." 

(Derp is slang for stupidity.)

The Daily Stormer takes its name from Der Stürmer, a Nazi tabloid. It's unclear what sort of traffic the site receives but it attracts a fringe readership. Readers have included Dylann Roof, who killed nine people in a 2015 mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and the man who last year killed Jo Cox, a British member of Parliament. 

CNET's Anne Dujmovic contributed to this report.

First published Aug. 14, 1:19 a.m. PT

Update, 7:01 p.m. PT: Updated to reflect that The Daily Stormer appears to be offline. 

Updates, 11:05 and 11:30 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to reflect that the site moved its registration to Google, and again to note that Google is canceling the registration.

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