The Minneapolis Police website has been down much of Saturday night. The website went down after a group claiming to be Anonymous posted a video warning. It’s not clear what caused the website to go down or if the two are connected. The warning video from Anonymous can be viewed later in this story.
You May See Error Messages When Visiting the Minneapolis Police Website
Although the Minneapolis Police website isn’t always down, multiple visits to the site by Heavy showed it was down the majority of the time during the late evening on May 30 and early morning of May 31.
The site that’s been down is the City of Minneapolis Police Department site at ci.minneapolis.mn.us. It normally looks like this:
Minneapolis.mn.us
But visits to the site revealed multiple different types of error messages. Sometimes a visit simply returned an Error 504 Gateway time-out message.
Minneapolis.mn.us
Sometimes when visiting, you’ll first get a message that reads: “Checking your browser before accessing… This process is automatic.”
Minneapolis.mn.us
After a few seconds, the message then reads: “The service is momentarily unavailable and will be back online ASAP.”
Minneapolis.mn.us
At times a refresh will bring back the regularly working site, but other times you’ll just keep getting an error message.
Other City of Minneapolis sites brought similar error messages, such as the homepage for the City of Minneapolis. Here you might see a message like the one below that reads: “The server is too busy at the moment.”
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/
The exact source of the website being down is not known, but 504 errors can be caused by DDOS attacks. It is possible that the website went down from all the attention the Minneapolis Police Department is getting right now.
The Anonymous Facebook Page Posted a Warning Video to the Minneapolis Police on May 28
Some people have noted online that the sites went down shortly after a group claiming to be Anonymous left a message warning Minneapolis and other police departments. You can view the video message below.
Although the message is just now going viral on social media and some are saying the police department’s website went down immediately after the message was shared, the message was actually posted on Facebook on May 28. It’s not clear if that was the original video post or if the video was posted in another form before this. If the Facebook video is taken down, you can see the video in a Reddit thread here that is likely to remain up. The video, which was shared on a Facebook page called Anonymous, says that police crimes are going to be revealed. The video is titled “Anonymous Message to the Minneapolis Police Department.”
Anonymous shared the video on Facebook and wrote: “So it begins…” The Anonymous Facebook page has more than 11 million followers. The same Facebook page has posted a few more status updates on Facebook since the video, but has not posted about the police website being down.
The video message includes a warning that reads, in part: “These officers must face criminal charges and officer Chauvin especially should face murder charges. Unfortunately, we do not trust your corrupt organization to carry out justice so will be exposing your many crimes to the world. We are legion. Expect us.”
The Minneapolis Police Department has two websites but only one of those sites went down.
The website “Inside MPD” has not gone down. On Facebook on April 18, the Minneapolis Police Department noted that the Inside MPD website would be where they would disseminate information and press releases.
It’s not clear if Anonymous was connected with the Minneapolis Police website going down, but many people on Twitter are posting updates believing the two are connected.
The way Anonymous decided to show up out of nowhere and getting the Minneapolis website to crash. EXPOSE WHAT NEEDS TO BE HEARD AND KNOWN! It’s about to get REAL.
ANONYMOUS TOOK DOWN THE MINNEAPOLIS POLICE WEBSITE AND THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING t.co/FXqe9lkiLS
As of the time of this article’s publication, the Anonymous Facebook page had not posted anything on its Facebook page about the Minneapolis website being down. It’s not clear if the two are connected.
Back in 2015, the Anonymous group leaked the identities of KKK members in a dump of 350 alleged member names, The Guardian reported.
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