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Intermittent Outages on City of Toronto Website
Speculation immediately turns to Anonymous, the loose hackitivist network that threatened to "remove" Rob Ford from the internet if he evicted Occupy Toronto.
Screengrab of what happens, for many users, when attempting to load the City of Toronto's homepage.
Users attempting to visit the City of Toronto’s website right now are meeting with mixed results: for some the page is loading normally, for others the error message shown above. As word started circulating on Twitter a few minutes ago that the site was down (there were also reports the mayor’s page was facing similar troubles), speculation immediately turned to Anonymous as the culprit. The very loose network of hacktivists released a video on Sunday in which they threatened to act against the City if it issued an eviction notice to the Occupy Toronto camp—a notice that went out yesterday. The video has since been taken down, but here’s one highlight:
“The brave citizens of Toronto are peaceful and well-mannered Occupiers, and we will not let the City, or the mayor that uses vulgar language in public, get involved. You have said that by next week the Occupiers shall be removed, and we say by next week if you do not change your mind, you shall be removed from the internet.”
City staff, meanwhile, told Globe and Mail reporter Patrick White that this is a technical glitch and not a cyber attack.
…And just like that, in the time it took us to write this post, the site seems to be back up. Just a coincidence, or an Anonymous attack quickly stopped? City staff say they are looking further into the cause of today’s outage.
Word from a City spokesperson: “The brief web disruption was the result of normal routine maintenance by the City.”