South Africa’s governing political party, the African National Congress (ANC), says it decided to take its website down this morning following a hacker group flooding its servers.

At 10am South African time today, the ANC’s website went down. At the time of writing the site is still not working.

A hacker group calling itself Anonymous Africa has claimed responsibility for the ANC website’s downtime.

Anonymous Africa said on its Twitter account that it targeted the ANC website with a “tsunami ddos” attack.

Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks involve a multitude of compromised systems attacking a single target, thereby causing denial of service for users of the targeted system, according to searchsecurity.techtarget.com.

Anonymous Africa said it has targeted the ANC because of its support of Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF political party.

“Well it wasn’t even a hack, what they did is flooded our servers to prevent anything else going in,” ANC spokesperson Keith Khoza told ITWeb Africa.

“So, we then advised our website administrators to shut it down and trace who is behind that,” Khoza said.

Regarding the ANC’s support of Zanu-PF, Khoza said that his organisation’s alliance with the Zimbabwean political party stems from its struggle against apartheid.

Khoza added that the ANC does “not support all their (Zanu-PF) policies".

“There are areas where we disagree with Zanu-PF,” Khoza told ITWeb Africa.

“And we believe that through our relationship, we'll be in a position to persuade them (Zanu-PF) to adopt what we regard as best practice in terms of democracy,” Khoza added.

Anonymous Africa’s timing of its attack on the ANC website comes as Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe has announced that elections are to take place in that country on July 31 this year - an announcement that has been rejected by opposition party the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Anonymous Africa this week, though, also launched cyber-attacks on websites belonging to South African news portal IOL, Zimbabwean newspaper The Herald and Zimbabwe’s ruling party Zanu-PF.

Attacks on these websites resulted in them briefly been inaccessible. However, at the time of writing, these websites are back up and running.

In the meantime, the targeted attack on the ANC website has drawn criticism from the political party’s spokesperson.

“Whoever is doing this cannot be a democrat because freedom of association cannot be negotiated, and neither can we coerced to change our positions because somebody says they're uncomfortable with that,” Khoza told ITWeb Africa.

“We will do whatever is possible to take legal action against whoever it is,” Khoza warned.