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New York Times website back online after brief outage

The website for The New York Times has returned online after being down for nearly two hours.

Visitors to one of the web's most popular sites were greeted with an “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" message, usually indicative that a server powering the site is down for maintenance or because it is being overloaded with traffic. The latter could be evidence of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.

The paper's official Twitter account said it was working to resolve "technical difficulties." And a spokeswoman blamed the outage on an "internal issue."

But a Fox News report, quoting an unidentified source, said the Times was under a "cyber attack."

DDoS attacks are nothing new, and have been increasing in size and power in recent years while becoming easier to launch and more difficult to detect.

The Grey Lady's IT woes appear to extend beyond the website. Times reporter Charlie Savage tweeted at approximately 12:15 p.m. EST that he hasn't been able to receive emails, only send them.

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