New York Times Down, Cyber Attack Alleged [Breaking]
The New York Times’ heavily trafficked website is down, and it appears that the paper of record may be under a severe cyber attack.
At this point, no official confirmation on a New York Times cyber attack being responsible for the large outage has been given — but many other news agencies report “sources” confirming that the site was targeted in a malicious act.
The New York Times has acknowledge the massive and unusual outage, but did not offer an explanation for the cause.
In the digital and social age of reporting, the New York Times has remained one of the few “old media” stalwarts navigating a changed space with little loss of gravitas. Many digital sites rely on the Times for citation and credibility, and by and large the paper runs without significant disharmony between its paper and digital properties.
Twitter is currently speculating on the reasons the New York Times’ site was possibly downed, and the page is still returning an error message if you attempt to load it.
Reports of a New York Times cyber attack seem to stem from Fox Business, and the site did not name the source for the information.
Fox says that security experts at the New York Times are attempting to bring the site back up — as well as the internet corporate site, which also was hit in the alleged attack:
“The source, who asked not to be named due to the sensitive nature of the issue, said the newspaper has been huddling with outside security professionals to assess the threat.”
Times writers seem to confirm the inaccessibility of both arms of the paper’s digital presence:
Interesting. In addition to NYT website being down, it appears I cannot receive work account emails; I can, however, successfully send them.
— Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) August 14, 2013
In the interim, the Times itself tweeted:
The New York Times Web site is experiencing technical difficulties. We expect to be back up shortly.
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 14, 2013
There are technical difficulties at http://t.co/i5NQrTmXJp that we hope to resolve soon. For news on Egypt’s crisis, follow @nytimesworld
— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 14, 2013
As the New York Times outage continues, many on Twitter (including writers) have joked about the major outage:
If @nytimes is down, how will I ever find out about Williamsburg?
— Evan McMurry (@evanmcmurry) August 14, 2013
All the news that’s fit to Http/1.1 Service Unavailable
— John Schwartz — NYT (@jswatz) August 14, 2013
One way to mitigate this might be for NY Times to perhaps print out important stories and distribute to readers every morning? As backup?
— Earl of Vadukut (@sidin) August 14, 2013
Others have pointed out that the New York Times cyber attack rumors come on the anniversary of another major outage:
The NYT site outage is actually our way of marking the 10-year anniversary of the Northeast blackout.
— Michael Roston (@michaelroston) August 14, 2013
pretty cool new media experiment the new york times is conducting in honor of the 10th anniversary of the blackout
— matt (@mattbuchanan) August 14, 2013
As of now, the New York Times remains inaccessible on the web — but some copies may remain at your local Starbucks.
