Besides the city's website, fortlauderdale.gov, the police department website, flpd.org, also was affected, as was the city's email system.
City officials said Monday evening that once they became aware of the denial-of-service attack, which created a Web traffic jam and kept people from accessing the sites, the city shut them down as a precaution. City Manager Lee Feldman said it was like "a school going into lockdown" to make sure no one entered the site for malicious purposes.
Mayor Jack Seiler said the city sites had not been breached and that the city restored its online systems around 6:30 p.m.
However, some attempts to access the city's sites Monday night were unsuccessful. While city officials said no critical services were affected, people seeking to pay utility bills or looking for other government information were out of luck.
Seiler warned that there could be additional denial-of-service attacks in the coming days or a need for the city to shut down its sites to take additional safety measures. City officials said they have notified state and federal authorities of the incident.
In a video posted on YouTube on Monday, Anonymous said it would shut down the city's online presence if the city didn't repeal ordinances that have made it illegal to panhandle at busy intersections, sleep on public property downtown and greatly restricted the ability of charitable groups to feed the homeless outdoors.
"You have 24 hours or less depending on whether this reaches you, Mayor [Jack] Seiler," the masked person in the video says. Seiler's name is mispronounced "Seeler" in the video.
The loosely organized group of computer hackers and social activists called its action "Operation Lift The Bans."
Seiler said the attack would not change the city's position regarding the recently passed laws and he doubted the action would have support from homeless advocates, who he imagined would be "trying to distance themselves from [the video] now because it's certainly not anything about trying to do good works in the community and good deeds."
Anonymous also posted a video in the beginning of November, shortly after police issued a citation to 90-year-old Arnold Abbott for feeding the homeless outdoors without meeting the new law's requirements. That earlier video called for people not to spend their money in the city.
Fort Lauderdale is not the first city to feel the wrath of Anonymous over a food-sharing law.
In 2011, the group targeted Orlando's government website in opposition to an ordinance there that requires a city permit when sharing food with 25 or more people in a downtown park. It brought down websites run by the Catholic Diocese of Orlando and the Rotary Club, demanding those groups "stand with the poor of Orlando."
At the time, the city had arrested about 28 people over a five-week period for violating the law, most of them members of the Food Not Bombs group, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
©2014 the Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.)
