The City of Johannesburg’s website is offline and its call centre is unreachable.

The city has responded to complaints on Twitter, confirming that its systems are “temporarily down.”

However, no further information was provided regarding the current outage.

Attempts to call City of Johannesburg hotlines reportedly resulted in callers being told that the number does not exist, while attempts to access the City of Johannesburg’s website are unsuccessful.

The outage has left users unable to register for e-services or receive their bills, according to complaints on social media.

This follows the municipality shutting down its systems on 25 October following a cyber attack that was allegedly perpetrated by a group named Shadow Kill Hackers.

It is unclear whether the website’s current downtime is linked to this.

Cyber attack

On 25 October, the City of Johannesburg tweeted that it had been the victim of a network breach, and had taken appropriate measures to mitigate the attack.

Following the attack, the municipality was forced to shut down various systems including its website, e-services, and billing systems.

A report by Business Day claimed that the City of Johannesburg had been sent a ransom note by Shadow Kill Hackers.

The group told the city it had “dozens of back doors inside your city” and had “compromised all passwords and sensitive data”.

The group demanded 4 bitcoin (about R435,000) before 28 October, or else it would upload the sensitive data online.

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