Former Tuscaloosa alternative radio station 101.7 recently went viral on TikTok and X/Twitter after playing Russian Taylor Swift covers on loop for hours on the morning of Dec. 22.

A few days after the announcement that Alt 101.7 would transition to new programming on Dec. 26, early morning listeners were confused to tune in and hear what sounded like Russian broadcast interference on the local station.

Several people took to social media to post about the incident.

Under the most popular TikTok post with hundreds of thousands of reactions, many commentors expressed concerns about Russian hacking attempts, while others were worried about the safety of station workers.

“Has anyone called the radio station? Maybe just to make sure they’re not being held hostage or something…” one TikTok user commented.

Although the station has not made any statement about the strange broadcasts, some radio websites hypothesize that the move was a marketing stunt to bring attention to the station’s format switch this week from “Alt 101.7″ to “101.7 The River,” a Christian station.

“The end of the stunt has all the markings of something that became too big for the station to control,” wrote Radio Insight’s Lance Venta. “After going viral on Saturday, WQRR [Alt 101.7] quickly pivoted away to something safer that also would have been a better fit for the now Christian format.”

Venta continued, “The ‘hacking’ stunt had tremendous opportunity to get national media attention should they have stuck with it through the original planned launch at noon but would have been an awful fit for a station going to Christian music and would not have served its purpose of retaining any listenership.”

Representatives for the station did not immediately respond to requests for comment.