RCMP national website goes offline Sunday

OTTAWA – The RCMP’s website was down for several hours on Sunday, but the cause of the outage was not immediately clear.

The site was back online by Sunday evening.

The outage comes a day after the cyber group Anonymous vowed to target the force to raise awareness about an RCMP officer involved in a shooting incident in B.C.

Anonymous has no identifiable leadership but online posters who say they’re members have claimed responsibility in the past for hacking incidents including the shutdown of the city of Cleveland’s website last fall.

The Mounties did not immediately respond to questions about the status of the website.

Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney’s office said little more than it was monitoring the situation.

The website of Canada’s spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, was recently taken down by a cyberattack.

Police in the northern B.C. community of Dawson Creek shot and killed a man last Thursday who they say refused to comply with officers’ instructions.

Social media posts claim the man was affiliated with Anonymous.