A screenshot of what browsers saw when attempting to access InMotion's websites following a hacking by 'TiGER-M@TE'.

Up to 700,000 websites, including thecloudcircle.com, were taken offline for much of yesterday after hackers infiltrated hosting company InMotion Hosting.

From around 8am British time yesterday, visitors to websites hosted by InMotion were greeted with the picture above, stating that the website had been hacked. A rap song played in the background.

Any files stored on InMotion’s servers as index.php were defaced and all directories within the public_html were targeted. The hacking did not simply target InMotion’s server but its data centres too.

At 5pm InMotion updated customers to say that “a portion” of its websites had been fully restored with an automated fix. It put this figure at 65 per cent at a further update at 7:30pm.

At 10pm, the company said it had finished building a second automated fix for people who didn’t have backups of their website and then at 3am this morning it said the majority of people should by then have their sites functioning properly again.

The Cloud Circle restored its website to full functionality shortly after being alerted to the problem by using its own IT team, rather than waiting for InMotion Hosting to address the problem.

The hacker identified himself as ‘TiGER-M@TE’ – a hacker from Bangladesh who has previously taken down Google’s website in his home country and claims to have also infiltrated Yahoo, American Express, Avast, Microsoft, Bing and Nokia. According to an interview on a hacking news site, he claims to work alone.

On the same website this morning – thehackernews.com – a comment purportedly left by the hacker claims his efforts yesterday could potentially be “a new world record” in terms of the number of websites hacked at one time.

The situation could have been worse – in some cases users have been directed to viruses and malware downloads instead of the website they sought, as was the case earlier this month when fellow hosting company GoDaddy had its websites hijacked.

In other cases, libellous and offensive information has been put up instead of the website. This is what happened when The Sun’s website was hacked by prolific cyber criminals LulzSec in July and readers were directed to a mock up of one of the newspaper’s real pages falsely reporting the death of its owner Rupert Murdoch.

John Guilfoil, the editor in chief of Blast Magazine, whose website was affected by yesterday’s hacking, said: “InMotion Hosting appeared woefully unable to prevent or defend against this kind of attack, even though homepage defacements have been going on seemingly forever.”