Report: New York Times website goes down, ‘likely’ hacked

The New York Times website experienced its second outage in just one month Tuesday afternoon, leaving users unable to load the site for about an hour.

The Times said the site had probably been hacked, according to reports.

{mosads}Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the paper, tweeted out late Tuesday afternoon: “Initial assessment – issue is most likely result of malicious external attack. Working to fix.”

After an initial outage, some parts of the website were available sporadically to users throughout Tuesday afternoon.

That sort of intermittent technical issue is associated with a virus attack, according to The Los Angeles Times.

Some reports point to the Syrian Electronic Army as the likely perpetrator. Security expert Matt Johansen tweeted that during the outage, the Times website briefly pointed to a Syrian Electronic Army domain. 

NYTimes DNS is compromised. Pointing to Syrian Electronic Army domain. http://t.co/wfJugHQ155 pic.twitter.com/Vhf35kuQAP

— Matt Johansen (@mattjay) August 27, 2013

The SEA has not taken credit yet for the attack, but tweeted late Tuesday afternoon that it had hacked Twitter’s domain.

Hi @Twitter, look at your domain, its owned by #SEA 🙂 http://t.co/ZMfpo1t3oG pic.twitter.com/ck7brWtUhK

— SyrianElectronicArmy (@Official_SEA16) August 27, 2013

On Aug. 14, the Times’s main website and mobile apps would not load for about an hour. The company said the problem was the result of “technical issues,” not a cyberattack.

Earlier this year the Times, along with several other prominent U.S. papers, were the targets of hacking campaigns that stemmed from China.

—This post was updated at 5:19 p.m.