Engineer Amrutha Tamanam, who had been vacationing in India, frantically rushed her return to the United States after a sudden announcement by Donald Trump proposing a $100,000 fee for the H-1B visa she possessed.
As she struggled to get back to the country she has resided in for a decade, far-right, racially motivated trolls initiated a coordinated effort to disrupt flight bookings from India, provocatively labeling their online campaign “clog the toilet.”
The White House subsequently clarified that the proposed H-1B fee was a one-time payment that would not be levied on current visa holders. However, major US corporations had already advised their foreign employees to return swiftly to preempt the fee or face the serious risk of being stranded overseas.
Tamanam, an Austin-based software engineer, began desperately searching for a flight out of the city of Vijayawada, just as users on the fringe message board 4chan moved to overwhelm airline reservation systems in an explicit attempt to block Indian visa holders from securing tickets.
A thread on 4chan encouraged users to identify India-US flight options, “initiate the checkout process,” but crucially, “don’t check out.” The mechanism aimed to clog the system, effectively preventing the visa holders from successfully returning to the United States before the fee announcement could take effect.
The campaign likely had a direct impact on Tamanam, who experienced repeated crashes on airline websites. The checkout page, which typically offers a buffer window of several minutes, was timing out much more rapidly. After multiple persistent attempts, she finally managed to rebook a one-way ticket to Dallas on Qatar Airways, spending approximately $2,000—an amount more than double the cost of her original round-trip fare. “It was hard for me to book a ticket, and I paid a huge fare for the panic travel,” Tamanam recounted to AFP.
‘Keep Them in India’
The 4chan thread—which also proliferated among far-right Trump supporters on platforms like Telegram and other fringe forums—clearly stated the objective: “Indians are just waking up after the H1B news. Want to keep them in India? Clog the flight reservation system!”
Responding posts, many of which were filled with racist slurs, advised participants to reserve and hold seats for popular India-US routes on various airline websites and booking platforms—but without finalizing the purchase. The explicit goal was to block available inventory on high-demand flights, thereby making it nearly impossible for H-1B holders to find available seats and successfully inflating ticket prices.
Illustrating the tangible scale of the organized disruption, one 4chan user posted a screenshot of their browser, claiming: “I got 100 seats locked.” Another participant wrote, “Currently clogging the last available seat on this Delhi to Newark flight.” While several 4chan users also boasted about holding up seats on Air India, an airline spokesperson informed AFP that their site experienced no measurable disruptions and their systems functioned normally.
Though measuring the overall effectiveness of the campaign was challenging, Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told AFP that the trolling was a clear attempt to “cause panic among H-1B visa holders.” Beirich also cautioned about the sinister ability of sites like 4chan to “radicalise people into extremist beliefs,” noting that several US mass shooters have previously published manifestos on the site.
The H-1B visa program allows US companies to sponsor foreign workers with specialized skills—such as scientists and computer programmers—for employment in the United States, typically for an initial period of three years, extendable up to six. The US grants 85,000 H-1B visas each year via a lottery system, with India accounting for roughly three-quarters of all recipients.
In the evolving landscape of information warfare, Brian Levin, founder of the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism, noted that this troll operation clearly demonstrates how malicious actors can launch disruptive attacks “with the stroke of a keyboard.” Levin told AFP that “As nationalistic politics takes hold across the world, an informal international association of opponents will use an array of aggressive tools, including the internet.” He concluded that what is most salient is “how rapidly it spread, how diverse the nations represented were, and how shared antipathy across international borders can be mobilised online.”
