The New York Times website went down for the second time in two weeks on Tuesday, after what the newspaper suspects was an attack by hackers.
On Tuesday afternoon, the site stopped working for a large swath of visitors. They received an "Internal Server Error" message instead. The Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group that supports Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, has claimed responsibility for the attack. At one point, the New York Times homepage re-directed to a page that read "Hacked By Syrian Electronic Army" and showed the SEA's logo.
This was the NYT homepage for a few minutes earlier pic.twitter.com/p8zJA96Nmn — Megan Hess (@mhess4) August 27, 2013
Matt Johansen, head of threat research center at WhiteHat Security, tweeted that the server belonging to the New York Times was pointing to a domain registered to the Syrian Electronic Army. The group also claimed responsibility for hacking Twitter accounts belonging to the AP, NPR, Reuters, BBC and Al Jazeera, as well as links on CNN, the Washington Post and Time.
"I can confirm that the site is down," Eileen Murphy, vice president of corporate communications for The New York Times, told The Huffington Post's Gerry Smith on Tuesday. "It's not down for every user. We are working to resolve the problem. Our initial assessment is it's most likely the result of a malicious external attack." She also confirmed the outage on Twitter.
Other users reported that the New York Times website was working normally for them. The newspaper tweeted:
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
and continued to push its stories out via social media:
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
The Times experienced a wider outage earlier this month, which affected its website as well as its internal email server. In a statement to readers, the newspaper explained the technical difficulties as a result of "a scheduled maintenance update." The website was down for about two hours.
UPDATE: The New York Times confirmed it was hacked in a statement, which was also posted to an alternate site for readers still unable to access nytimes.com:
Marc Frons, chief information officer for The New York Times Company, issued a statement at 4:20 p.m. warning employees that the disruption — which appeared to still be affecting the Web site as of 5:50 p.m. — was " the result of a malicious external attack by the Syrian Electronic Army “or someone trying very hard to be them.” He advised employees to “be careful when sending e-mail communications until this situation is resolved.”
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1 of 21 Jill Abramson, executive editor Getty Share this slide:
L'accès au site Internet du journal américain '''' a été victime d'une , mardi après-midi. C'est la deuxième de ce mois d'août. Cet incident intervient en pleine guerre civile en , un jour après que les inspecteurs chargés d'enquêter sur l'affaire des armes chimiques aient été pris pour cible par des snipers.

L'attaque provient d'un groupe de personnes pro- se définissant comme l'Armée Électronique Syrienne. En effet : des visiteurs ont pu apercevoir, sur la page d'accueil du site hacké, le logo de cette armée électronique. Ils ont également pu y lire le texte suivant : « Hacked by Electronic Syrian Army » (''Hacké par l'Armée Électronique Syrienne''). D'autres visiteurs recevaient un message indiquant qu'une erreur interne liée aux serveurs s'est produite.

Le ''New York Times'' a déclaré sur son compte  que l'accès a son site a été restreint et que le problème était en train d'être résolu. Les responsables de la panne se sont vantés, également sur Twitter, d'avoir réussi à pirater nytimes.com.