The website of The New York Times suffered an outage Wednesday that lasted several hours.
(Read more: Threat from cybercrime? 'You ain't seen nothing yet')
The site, which apparently went down a little after 11:00 a.m. ET, continues to be difficult to reach. Users who tried to visit the site received a "Service Unavailable" message.
The website returned briefly a little after 1:00 p.m. ET but quickly became unavailable again. It then returned to normal a little before 2:00 p.m. ET.
While the site was down, the Times published several articles on Facebook via its page on the social network. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal, a competitor of the Times, removed its paywall for a few hours while the Times was unavailable.
"Bonus lunchtime reading: WSJ.com is free to everyone for the next 2 hours."
The site's Lede Blog sent a tweet at 11:21 a.m. ET that acknowledged the company was aware of the problem.
"We are having technical problems on http://nytimes.com - please follow -@RobertMackey for Twitter updates on Egypt crackdown."
While the cause of the outage is unclear, a NYT spokesperson said that the company had "no reason to believe" the disruption was the result of an outside attack, according to a Washington Post report.
(Read more: Cybercrime may cost US economy $100 billion, says new study )
