On November 24, Aziz Karimov, a journalist based in Baku, received an email from Facebook notifying him of a request to reset his password. Karimov knew something was wrong since he hadn’t requested a password change. Ninety minutes later, as he struggled to regain access to his account, he received four more notifications from Facebook. He was informed that he had also been removed as an administrator from four other pages, including one belonging to Turan News Agency, Azerbaijan’s only independent news agency.

“I thought I managed to change passwords but two, three minutes later I saw that I was removed from all of the pages, including the ones I have created myself,” he said.

While Karimov battled the hacking of his accounts, the administrators of another Facebook page, Azadliq Radio, Azerbaijan Service for Radio Free Europe were also hacked. Over the next three to four hours, staff realized they had lost all their video content—over 2,000 videos, posts and photos. The station also lost some 25,000 of its 500,000 followers.

This was not the first time these pages were targeted, nor are they the only media organizations in Azerbaijan to fall victim to hacking. The independent Turan News Agency was targeted by authorities last year and its editor in chief was briefly arrested in a tax-evasion and abuse-of-power investigation. Last January, the Facebook page of the Berlin-based Meydan TV—a news site which covers events in Azerbaijan in three languages—lost control of its Facebook page. During the time the page was inaccessible to its administrators, the channel lost all its posts and one fifth of its 500,000 followers. In all cases, it was eventually possible to restore access to the pages and accounts.