The New York Times Website Goes Down; Is It A Cyber Attack?

The New York Times website was down for for over an hour today. Users who entered the web address reported an error page that listed the site as unreachable.

Fox Business reports that the New York Times was under a "major cyber attack,” according to a source. The New York Times company has been targeted in the past by Chinese hackers.

NYTimes — The New York Times website is down, Fox Business reports that it is due to a cyber attack. IsItDownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com

Patrick LaForge, editor for news presentation at the New York Times, confirmed that the site was down. He wrote on Twitter that the organization is aware of the problem and it is being fixed. Mobile applications for the newspaper were still functional, for Android and iOS devices. The New York Times social accounts also confirmed that the site was down but did not offer any other information.

Daniel Slotnik, New York Times employee and curator of the company's obituaries, said on his Twitter account that employees are "hearing that a malfunctioning system patch somehow brought down the site and email." Multiple reporters said that they were unable to access their email during the outage.

Science writer Henry Fountain wrote on Twitter that the NYTimes.com issue was not due to hackers. "Apparently Times outage is not a cyberattack. Meaning Fox News is wrong. Shockingly," Fountain wrote.

Update: The New York Times issued a statement regarding the outage, and the site is now back online.

"As you are undoubtedly aware, we are experiencing a server issue that has resulted in our e-mail and Web site being unavailable. We believe the outage is the result of an internal issue, which we expect to be resolved soon. We will communicate further when we have more information."

New York Times journalists took some time to poke fun at the technical issues on Twitter.