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The Day the Web Learned What It'd Be Like to Lose The New York Times

Stop the presses. The New York Times's website is down went down this afternoon. 

By Alexander Abad-Santos
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This article is from the archive of our partner .

Stop the presses. The New York Times's website is down. For the first time (in what seems like forever) the Gray Lady's web site, nytimes.com, has gone down, shutting down one major way people get news and depriving good people of today's dining section. An elaborate hack? A harmless glitch? We've contacted The Times to get the word. Here's one eyewitness to the crash:

If you are in desperate need of The Times, there is slight hope. Times tech blogger Jenna Wortham points out that the mobile version is still accessible:

Remain calm folks, there's always this version.

Update 11:45 a.m. The New York Times is down, and The New York Times is on it, tweets staffer Patrick LaForge. Dining section fans, hang in there.

Update 11:50 a.m. Yes, The New York Times site was even down for the almighty Drudge Report, which is linking, in vain, to this story about the Clinton Foundation.

Update 11:55 a.m. Breaking (get it?):  There's now official word from The Times themselves on the outage, further cementing that Twitter is where everyone get their news.

Update 11:58 a.m. The New York Times has not explained what went wrong with the site, but apparently Fox Business is reporting The Times is the subject of a cyberattack. (Cue the meta schadenfreude and the earnest "breaking" label.)

Update 12:04 p.m.  The e-mails we've (and others) sent to corporate contacts have all come back with the message: "Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently." This is leading to the speculation that the problem may be a server problem.

Update 12:22 p.m. The first conspiracy theory on The New York Times outage is here:

Update 12:35 p.m. More word from The Times staffers sounds like it came from within the company, not the cyber attack Fox is reporting. Here's a snippet of information on that patch from The Times's Daniel Slotnick:

And another Times staffer, says the company is telling employees that the outage is an internal issue, batting down the idea of a massive cyber attack:

And here is The New York Times's communications team is confirming the "internal issue."

Update 1:03 p.m. It's alive! The Times website has now been restored for a few of us (Wire staffers are finding that it's loading faster on some of our computers compared to others. A couple still can't get it to load.).

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.