Hacker group Anonymous Africa claimed to be behind the shutdown of SABC websites on Sunday.
The hacker, who goes by the twitter handle @zim4thewin, claimed he or she was trying to give the SABC a taste of its own medicine by censoring its websites.
This comes after SABC chief operating officer Hlaudi Motsoeneng announced that the national broadcaster would no longer show footage of protests in which state property is damaged.
Late on Saturday night, the account tweeted: “Journalists, if you are bored. Tomorrow, at around lunch time, the SABC will be on the receiving end of largest DDoS attack to hit SA ever”.
At around midday on Sunday, the SABC’s main site as well as SAfm and 5FM’s websites were inaccessible.
“SABC are being censored for censoring.”
DDOS stands for Distributed Denial of Service.
An attack using this method floods a targeted system with traffic, causing it to become overloaded and unable to handle new requests. The hack attack ended a few hours later.
“We will stop the attacks at SABC (for now) at 4pm. We are not done yet, lots of action coming. Things are going to get wild!” Anonymous Africa tweeted.