Is the New York Times Website Experiencing a Cyberattack?

Those hopping onto the New York Times for a look at the headlines were met with this message Wednesday:

Visitors to the New York Times Wednesday morning saw this message. (Image: NYTimes.com screenshot)

The outage of the website was confirmed by the New York Times on Twitter.

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/367675408935706624"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/367678187246854144"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/367688954390142976"]

The Times' corporate website NYTco.com was down beginning late morning as well.

Just what caused the website of the major American newspaper to go down is not yet clear. The Associated Press reported the Times' spokeswoman Danielle Rhodes Ha saying the newspaper is looking into the situation but offered no further insights.

In addition, the AP reported emails sent to contacts with New York Times email addresses were returned as undeliverable.

Matt Egan with Fox Business reported unnamed sources saying it's a cyberattack.

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/MattMEgan5/status/367675751899725825"]

The hashtag DDOS in Egan's tweet references a common form of cyberattack known as a distributed denial of service. This type of attack floods a server with traffic to make websites unavailable.

Some have taken to Twitter to share other interesting and funny theories as to what might have downed the sites as well. Here's a look at a few:

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/laura_lrnzo/status/367676843987464193"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/kurtisscaletta/status/367676794255589376"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/CharlatAnne/status/367676386947133440"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/ShakespeareGeek/status/367676177550675968"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/THECOUNTnews/status/367680163837775872"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/bgporter/status/367676368559292416"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/segue13/status/367675914068324352"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/jolshan/status/367675618554839040"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/BBrad114/status/367675550795841536"]

[blackbirdpie url="https://twitter.com/ellejaii/status/367683157954289664"]

If you have your own theory as to why the Times website went down, share it in our comments section.

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Update 1: As of just after 1 p.m. EST, both of the New York Times websites were back online. While it was offline and working to restore function, the Times continued to post stories of breaking news to its Facebook page.

Update 2: The Times cited "a scheduled maintenance update" as the likely source of the outage.

Featured image via Erika Cross / Shutterstock.com. 

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