Suspected cyber-attack takes down New York Times website

The website for The New York Times was likely hit by a cyber-attack on Tuesday, with outages reported for many users of the internationally-renowned news site.

The NY Times Twitter account reported "technical difficulties" for the iconic news website, and added that the paper will continue to report the news. By early Wednesday morning in the US, most users were able to access the website again. 

Read more from GlobalPost: NYTimes.com crashes, company blames scheduled maintenance

The pro-government Syrian Electronic Army is suspected to be behind the attacks, a suspicion bolstered by screenshots of the website where the SEA takes credit for the action. 

Times employees also had to take care while sending sensitive emails on Tuesday, the newspaper reported, after the hacking group hit Melbourne IT, the newspaper's domain name registrar. 

Twitter was also affected on Tuesday, almost certainly by the same hacking group: DNS records for twimg.com, used for image serving, were briefly affected for about two hours, with no breach of user information according to a comany statement. 

The Times website went down on Aug. 14 as well, in an incident that was widely considered to be the result of a server problem and not an intentional cyber-attack.