Russian hackers claim credit for felling the websites of two British airports as Birmingham and London go down

• Birmingham and London City Airports have been having technical issues today 

The websites of two major British airports have gone down amid claims they have been targeted by Russian hackers.

Birmingham Airport and London City Airport have both seen their websites hit with cyber issues this afternoon, leaving visitors struggling to access them.

Those trying to get onto the websites are instead being redirected to error pages which say they cannot connect due to ‘bad gateways’ and indicating there are issues with the sites’ servers.

Two Russian hacker groups – UserSec and Anonymous Russia – claim to have taken responsibility for the outages in what appears to be retaliation for Nato’s support of Ukraine.

On its Telegram page UserSec, which has previously targeted Swedish airline SAS, wrote: ‘We decided to put one of the largest airports in the UK to sleep. Glory to Russia!’

The hacking group also shared a post by Anonymous Russia in which it took responsibility for taking down Birmingham Airport’s website

Pro-Russia hacking collective UserSec posted on Wednesday that it had taken down the website for London City Airport

Users trying to access Birmingham Airport’s website were greeted with an error page saying there was a ‘gateway time-out’

Those trying to get onto London City Airport’s website received a similar message warning there was an error with the host

It also shared a post by Anonymous Russia which said: ‘Anonymous Russia joins the attack on UK airports! Before your eyes, the sleeping international British airport Birmingham! Glory to Russia!’

According to Check-Host, a tool that monitors websites and their availability, both Birmingham and London City suffered server errors on Wednesday afternoon.

The causes for this have not yet been confirmed, with Birmingham Airport confirming it is looking into the issues, and there is no indication it is affecting normal operations at the airports.

A spokesperson for Birmingham Airport said: ‘Some people have reported our website has been loading slowly this afternoon. We are investigating.’

MailOnline has contacted London City Airport for comment.

Russian hacker groups have targeted western nations since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 in revenge for their support of Kyiv.

UserSec first came to prominence in February this year when it worked with another Russian hacker collective, KillNet, to target multiple hospitals and medical providers in the United States.

The same month it took part in an attack on Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) which took its website offline.

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