The hacking collective Anonymous claimed responsibility for taking down the city of Oakland police department website, as well as its Twitter account, Wednesday morning. The site remains down as of 3 o’clock p.m. Pacific Time.
According to Twitter user @OpTamirRice, the cyber attack came in response to the perceived use of violence by Berkeley police in response to the protests that have rocked the city this week.
Karen Boyd, a spokeswoman for the city of Oakland, told the Oakland Tribune that staffers were trying to restore the website after it had been offline since late Tuesday night. The city website was also down Wednesday afternoon, after having been online earlier in the day.
It appears Anonymous may have targeted the wrong law enforcement agency; according to the Tribune, Oakland police were reported to have fired non-lethal projectiles into a crowd of people who had stopped traffic on Highway 24 Tuesday night. However, several witnesses have since stated that it was California Highway Patrol who had fired the projectiles, in an effort to clear the freeway.
The California Highway Patrol website remains up and running at the time of publication.
This is not the first time Anonymous has taken down a website belonging to an Oakland public agency; in 2011, the group targeted the website of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system to protest the shooting death of a young, unarmed black man, Oscar Grant, by an Oakland police officer.