New York Times Back Up After Server Outage [Update]

Today’s New York Times outage is finally over, but the massive news giant was taken down for hours in the middle of the day following what was rumored to be a cyber attack.

Just before noon, the New York Times went completely down, returning an “error message” page on all browsers and sparking speculation that the site had been targeted by hackers.

Fox Business quoted a source as saying that the NYT security team was “huddled” and trying to figure out the source of the alleged cyber attack, fueling rumors that the paper was deliberately targeted.

The Times tweeted:

“As you are undoubtedly aware, we are experiencing a server issue that has resulted in our e-mail and Web site being unavailable. We believe the outage is the result of an internal issue, which we expect to be resolved soon. We will communicate further when we have more information.”

However, the digital arm of the New York Times didn’t resort to Minesweeper waiting for the paper to come back online.

As the NYT outage persisted, the title took to social media to continue reporting on other issues and stories as the day wore on. One of the major issues covered was unrest in Egypt, and the paper used Twitter to publish tweets without links until the page came back up after the lengthy downtime.

Facebook also carried news stories on the New York Times’ official page, where the paper explained:

“In the meantime, we are publishing key news articles in their entirety here on Facebook. Our latest story on the conflict in Egypt is here.”

Several New York Times articles were published to Facebook as “notes” while the server remained down.