The Web site of The New York Times crashed on Wednesday due to problems with the company’s server, which forced the newspaper to publish its stories on Facebook.
The outage came on a busy news day, which led to speculation that the Web site was under a cyber attack. Fox Business, a website of Fox News, quoted unnamed sources saying that the paper was consulting “outside security professionals” to solve the problem.
The New York Times, which has been the leading US newspaper for decades, said on its Twitter feed that the outage was the “result of an internal issue” disrupting the paper’s Web site and email system.
The company restored the website, which is the most popular newspaper portal in the United States, within hours and said the glitch resulted from system maintenance.
“As you may know, our Web site was unavailable for a period of time earlier today,” the paper said after service was restored. “The outage occurred within seconds of a scheduled maintenance update, which we believe was the cause.”