New York Times is back online after prolonged outage

The New York Times’ website and mobile apps experienced some downtime earlier today, an outage that the paper is now attributing to an “internal issue.” Both the site and apps appear to be back online for most people at this time.

Here’s an official response from the publication’s Twitter account:

The New York Times Web site is experiencing technical difficulties. We expect to be back up shortly.

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 14, 2013

We believe the outage is the result of an internal issue, which we expect to be resolved soon. (2/3)

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 14, 2013

We will communicate further when we have more information. – from @NYTimesComm (3/3)

— The New York Times (@nytimes) August 14, 2013

We don’t know exactly what caused the downtime. Fox Business reported that the site was down due to a cyberattack, which hasn’t been confirmed. Initially, VentureBeat speculated that the downtime could have something to do with overwhelming traffic to “The Jockey“, a 10,000-word feature article that was a sequel of sorts to the NYT’s popular “Snow Fall” piece.

We’re following up with the publisher for more information. Right now it looks like most of the NYT editorial staff is also in the dark about why the site is offline, (although NYT reporter Ravi Somaiya did say he pressed a big red button.)

Note: An earlier version of this story suggested that Jockey was the cause of the outage. We’ve updated to clarify that the cause is still unknown.