“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” The tweet quickly triggered a massive online reaction that got heightened after Amazon's Executive Chairman Jeff Bezos responded to her tweet and called her out in a tweet that pointed out that he did not believe that Anya was working to make the world better.

Because of Bezos' influence, his highlight of Anya's tweet further ignited a chain reaction of responses. (Some users came to Anya's defense, pointing out that Anya had shown support for the unionization of Amazon in the past.) The online ruckus quickly caught Anya's employer's attention, and the institution issued a statement on their online platform about the incident.

In an interview with "The Cut," Anya said that Bezos had picked on her, and incited violence on her. She also said that her emails were bombarded with emails with subject lines that started with the N-word, bitch, genetically inferior, all kinds of things."

Nearly 4,000 Carnegie Mellon University Students have since written a letter in support of the professor, criticizing the university for the way that they responded to the situation. In the letter, the signees underscored that Anya is a valuable scholar whose research had become a force for diversity, equity and inclusion. Anya later doubled down on her stance and as she stated that the monarch had contributed to the death of many of her family members by genocide. This further spurred an online discussion about Britain's role in the anguish that people experienced during the Nigerian Civil War.