This appears to be the third cyber attack by @VirusSec this month. Last week, the department of environmental affairs’ (DEA) website was hacked, and earlier in June, the Presidency’s website was also down.

City of Tshwane spokesperson Selby Bokaba insisted that the site was live and sent a video of him navigating through it, but it could not be accessed by three News24 staff members on different devices at 11:15 on Tuesday.

“It’s up on our side. I access it through the intranet, and it takes less than three seconds to connect. On our intranet we have a link that takes us to the CoT public website,” Bokaba said.

The same Twitter account also claimed responsibility in August 2017 for taking down the government of South Africa’s website, tweeting: “This is for allowing the sale of rhino horn and lion bones.” News24