The New York Times' website went down for many users Tuesday afternoon for the second time in less than a month.
Users started complaining about the Times website outage around 3 p.m. ET. The Times confirmed this in a tweet a little more than an hour later:
The New York Times Web site is experiencing technical difficulties. We are working on fully restoring the site.— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 27, 2013
A representative for the Times noted in a tweet that the outage appeared to be due to a "malicious external attack."
re: http://t.co/BQE1fJ3uLx - initial assessment - issue is most likely result of malicious external attack. working to fix— Eileen Murphy (@NYTeileen) August 27, 2013
The Times continued to publish stories by going around the domain name server.
We will continue to publish the news. Here is our latest report on Syria: http://t.co/o3idAOaeBa— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 27, 2013
Meanwhile, at least one of the Times' competitors -- The Wall Street Journal -- tried to pounce on the opportunity by taking down its own paywall. For the record, the Journal pulled the same stunt the last time the Times website went down.
Free read @WSJ paywall is down— WSJ Communications (@WSJPR) August 27, 2013
Earlier this month, the Times website and apps suffered a prolonged outage, which prompted the publication to start publishing on Facebook instead. Some speculated at the time that the Times had been hacked, but the publication said the outage was related to a "scheduled maintenance update."
UPDATE: The Times appears to have been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army. Several users trying to visit the site noticed the following image:
