For the second time this month, the New York Times website went down on Tuesday and a spokesperson for the publication believes that the second outage was likely caused by hackers.
New York Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy tweeted the following about the outage:
"The issue is most likely the result of a malicious external attack," Murphy's account read as an initial reaction to the site going down again.
The site wouldn't load for users in the middle of the afternoon on Tuesday and a screen saying "server not found" popped up.
The New York Times Twitter account sent out a tweet that read, "The New York Times Web site is experiencing technical difficulties. We are working on fully restoring the site."
It's not uncommon for major websites to be hacked as it happens all the time. According to the Chicago Tribune, hackers promoting the Syrian Electronic Army hacked into CNN's website earlier this month along with the Time website and the Washington Post. Tuesday was the second time in a month that the New York Times website went down. On Aug. 14, the site was down for several hours citing a scheduled maintenance update as the reasons behind it.
The maintenance update on Aug. 14 occurred just several minutes after the site went down, according to the Chicago Tribune. However, judging by Murphy's tweet of the downtime being a surprise, a scheduled update wasn't the cause Tuesday.
The cyber-attack on the site, deemed to be most likely from Syrian supporters, comes just after the U.S. said it was preparing to launch strikes in Syria.
As a barb to the New York Times, Dow Jones Chief Executive and crosstown rival of the Times Lex Fenwick tweeted Tuesday that the Wall Street Journal was "free to all for a few hours," as a way of mocking the Times for going down.
The Times site is back up, but it will be hard to find who actually did the hacking as the attackers can hide their address with ease due to the ability to route traffic through a web of networks.
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