The New York Times was the victim Tuesday of what a spokeswoman called most likely a "malicious external attack" — its second outage over the past two weeks.
The pro-Assad group Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) claimed that it was responsible for the attack, and also said it had compromised Twitter's domain name and would go after the Huffington Post.
Eileen Murphy, the Times' vice president of corporate communications, confirmed in a statement that the company was viewing the situation as a result of a hack.
"Our initial assessment is that this is most likely the result of a malicious external attack," Murphy said.
As of 4:23 p.m. ET, the company said it was still working on fixing the glitches. As of 5:30, it was still having issues. Here's what an attempted visit to the site looked like:
Multiple Twitter users who tried to visit the Times' website also saw this image:
This was the NYT homepage for a few minutes earlier pic.twitter.com/p8zJA96Nmn
— Megan Hess (@mhess4) August 27, 2013
As it did last time the Times went down, the Wall Street Journal immediately pounced on the news to offer online readers a chance to browse the site for free:
Free read @WSJ paywall is down
— WSJ Communications (@WSJPR) August 27, 2013
