New York Times Website hacked, Company says

Twitter and The New York Times were hit with cyber attacks on Tuesday, with credit quickly claimed by a hacking group Syrian Electronic Army.

Within minutes of the attack, the New York Times announced in a Twitter message that it would continue to publish news. The company quickly set up alternative websites, posting stories about chemical attacks in Syria. “Not Easy to Hide a Chemical Attack, Experts Say,” was the headline of one.

New York Times Co spokeswoman Eileen Murphy tweeted on Tuesday that the "issue is most likely the result of a malicious external attack," based on an initial assessment.

This is the second time the Times has experienced problems with its website in two weeks. On August 14, the site was down for several hours, an outage likely related to a scheduled maintenance update that occurred within seconds of the website's going down.

“Media is going down…” warned the Syrian Electronic Army in a Twitter message before the websites stopped working, adding that it also had taken over Twitter and the Huffington Post U.K.