New York Times website suffers outage

The New York Times website appeared to be offline for more than an hour on Wednesday, as visitors to NYTimes.com were greeted with a "service unavailable" message.

It's unclear what caused the outage. "We believe the outage is the result of an internal issue and we're working on resolving it," Eileen Murphy, a New York Times Co. spokeswoman, wrote in an email to Yahoo News.

The site came back online shortly before 1 p.m. ET.

According to Fox Business reporter Matt Egan, the Times was the target of "a major cyberattack." An unnamed source told Egan that the newspaper "has been huddling with outside security professionals to assess the threat."

However, the paper's Twitter feed relayed a message that suggested something far less sinister.

The paper's corporate communications office then released a longer statement via Twitter:

And Daniel Slotnik, who works in the Times' obituary department, tweeted an update:

Also on Wednesday, the Syrian Electronic Army, an online hacktivist group, appeared to be behind the hacking of several New York Post staffers' Twitter and Facebook accounts.

There was no indication that attack and the Times' issue were related.

And some staffers at the Times did not appear to be taking the outage too seriously.

And one Times reader was quick to point out that the print version was, for once, more reliable than the digital edition.