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What happened to the New York Times website

The popular newspaper website went down on Wednesday morning due to internal IT problems. Here's what we know now.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

The New York Times (NYT) website was down on August 14 for over three hours. According to the NYT, the site going down during one of he busiest times of the news day was the result of a failure during regular maintenance rather than a hacker attack.

It wasn't just the NYT website. According to sources at the paper, the nytimes.com e-mail server also went down.

One report, from Fox Business News, had stated that the corporate and media sites of The New York Times were experiencing a major cyber attack. That was not the case according to the NYT. “The outage occurred within seconds of a scheduled maintenance update being pushed out, and we believe that was the cause,” said Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman.

Specifically, according to a source close to the NYT,  the primary cause for the outage was due to bad firewall configuration change that blocked all incoming traffic and for some reason the IT staff wasn't able to rollback the change.

True,  there are groups that are trying to attack and hack the NYT website. In this case though it appears that it  was good old human error that took the site down.

While the site was up by 3PM yesterday, the site wasn't fully functional until later in the day.

During the outage, the NYT kept reporting on the news by posting to social networks such as its Facebook page.

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