Post date: Aug 14, 2013 6:52:15 PM
The New York Times website has been unavailable since late Wednesday morning, and it is not clear what is causing the outage. The outage comes months after Chinese hackers penetrated the newspaper's computer systems.
INTERNET (AUGUST 14, 2013) (REUTERS) - People accessing nytimes.com got a message that the service is unavailable on Wednesday (August 14). The website outage lasted for hours from late morning, but by 1345 EDT (1745 GMT) its regular appearance had been restored.
A New York Times Co <NYT.N> spokeswoman confirmed the site was down and that they were looking into the matter.The New York Times directed readers to follow specific Twitter accounts for news.
The Twitter feed for its opinion section said, "Readers, don't fret. If http://nytimes.com remains down, we are ready to tweet op-eds and editorials in 140-character increments."
The website outage comes just months after the newspaper said Chinese hackers had "persistently" attacked its computers. In January 2013, the New York Timessaid the hacking had taken place "over the past four months" since the paper published a story on Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao.
At the time, the New York Times hired computer security experts at Mandiant to investigate and found that there were at least 40 hacker groups, called advanced persistent hacker units.
China rejected the hacking accusations. The Chinese government has repeatedly said it opposes hacking and that China too suffers frequently from these kinds of attacks.
It is not clear what caused Wednesday's website outage, but a Twitter feed for the New York Times communications department said: "We believe the outage is the result of an internal issue."
The New York Times website is America's most popular news site, according to comScore, Inc., receiving more than 30 million unique visitors per month.