The New York Times website was the subject of a malicious external attack on Tuesday a spokeswoman said.
The attack left the website unavailable to many users from about 3pm ET. It was the second time the NYT's site has gone offline in the past two weeks.
Eileen Murphy a spokeswoman for the New York Times said on Twitter that the the initial assessment was that the issue was most likely result of malicious external attack that the company was working to fix .
re http //t.co/BQE1fJ3uLx initial assessment issue is most likely result of malicious external attack. working to fix
Eileen Murphy ( NYTeileen) August 27 2013The site appeared to be still be inaccessible early on Wednesday. The NYT tweeted that it was also publishing at news.nytco.com.
A Twitter account purporting to represent the Syrian Electronic Army an internet hacktivist group supportive of the Assad regime claimed responsibility.
The problems began just after 3pm ET and initially appeared to be intermittent. At 4 23pm the NYT posted on Twitter
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 2013Three minutes later it declared that it would continue to publish the news and linked to a report on Syria which appeared to be hosted on a basic version of its site.
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 2013The newspaper's website previously went down on Wednesday 14 August. The site vanished just after 11am along with its mobile app. It remained offline for two hours before returning. At the time of that incident Murphy said it was caused by maintenance work and there was no reason to believe that this was the result of a cyber attack .
It was also alleged on Tuesday that Twitter had been the victim of an attack by the SEA. Bryan Ries a senior editor at Newsweek tweeted that the social media website had lost its domain to the Syrian Electronic Army .
Um guys I think twitter just lost its domain to the Syrian Electronic Army http //t.co/qQm8OkvxWX pic.twitter.com/eDUmlCG6gn
Brian Ries ( moneyries) August 27 2013Ries shared a link showing that the admin name and email for the domain name twitter.com had been changed to SEA SEA and sea sea.sy respectively.
The SEA also claimed it owned 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 2013But there was no apparent disruption to Twitter's service.
The site later released a statement confirming that part of its operation used to view images had been affected but did not mention other attacks that appeared to have been carried out by the activists.
The statement read Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted. By 22 29 UTC the original domain record for twimg.com was restored. No Twitter user information was affected by this incident.
The Syrian Electronic Army allegedly hacked the Washington Post's website on 15 August. Managing editor Emilio Garcia Ruiz said the website had fallen victim to a sophisticated phishing attack to gain password information .
The SEA is a collection of computer hackers who support the Syrian president Bashar al Assad. They have used denial of service attacks and other methods to target opposition groups and western media websites. The group's relationship with Assad's government is the subject of debate.
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