New York Times Hacked? Apparent Cyberattack Takes Down Website

The New York Times' corporate and media sites suffered a cyber attack Wednesday, a source told Fox Business. After the site was down for about an hour, a New York Times employee said on Twitter that the cause was an internal problem, nothing malicious from the outside.

The paper, NYTimes.com, and its corporate site, NYTco.com, went down around 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time  with an error message that read "http/1.1 Service Unavailable."


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A number of messages came over Twitter after the site closed down:

We are having technical problems on http://t.co/lAgdG2fKQL - please follow @RobertMackey for Twitter updates on Egypt crackdown

— NYTimes Lede Blog (@thelede) August 14, 2013

Breaking: Website of @NYTimes is under #cyber attack, source tells @FoxBusiness - $NYT #DDoS

— Matt Egan (@MattMEgan5) August 14, 2013

The attack was suggested to be a DDoS one, or "Denial-of-Service," which makes a site unavailable to its users.

However, obituary staff member Daniel Slotnik posted several tweets saying that internal emails at the New York Times said it was a system problem.

internal email: "We believe the outage" stems from "an internal issue, which we expect to be resolved soon.

— Daniel E. Slotnik (@DSlotnik) August 14, 2013

The Times reported in January that its computer systems had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers, who stole reporters' passwords and hunted for files on an investigation into the wealth amassed by the family of a top Chinese leader. 

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