While Microsoft has indicated these outages are a mess of its own making, hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan has claimed responsibility for the downtime, and said it did the deed as retaliation for the US government interfering with the internal affairs of the civil war-ravaged African nation.

The potentially-pro-Russian crew stated its claim on its Telegram channel, with messages coinciding with the timing of the first outage. Afterward, the group reportedly said it would again attack Microsoft’s services because the company said the problem was technical rather than a cyberattack.