A U.S. firm that links more than 700 companies to their customers via social media received messages saying a Syrian group hacked their web address to upload a message to the websites linked to it.

CEO Patrick Salyer of Gigya said the company discovered it was being hit by sporadic failures that denied access to their service. He said the hackers actually rerouted the internet traffic from their website to an outside computer server.

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The server then generated a message to users visiting Gigya's customers' sites. The hackers were said to be the Syrian Electronic Army.

The hacker's message appeared on websites of UK newspapers, CNBS and also the National Hockey League. Messages also appeared on retail sites hours before the Black Friday sale.

Salyer said the hackers rerouted Gigya's web traffic by tweaking the company's web address on the Internet registry called Whois.com. Gigya staff detected the breach and it was fixed an hour later. Salyer assured Gigya clients their data is safe.

"To be absolutely clear: Neither Gigya's platform itself nor any user, administrator or operational data has been compromised and was never at risk of being compromised."

The Syrian Electronic Army has openly linked itself to Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and also hacked media sites such as E!Online and the BBC in the past.

TagsSyrian Hackers, American websites, Gigya, before Thanksgiving, President Bashar al-Assad