The New York Times' official homepage went down on Tuesday. It was reported that this could be due to malicious hacking. A spokesperson for the newspaper confirmed the possibilities in a report.

The external attack on the website was assumed to have been caused by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA). There were also reports by researchers that the domain name of the Web site was registered under the SEA. In the meantime, the SEA nullified all assumptions and confirmed that they have been successfully able to hack Twitter.

The SEA supported Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian President. The New York Times was apparently targeted by the group after the U.S. expressed plans on taking serious actions against the Assad regime. This is, in fact, not the first time that the SEA took to attacking Web sites and media organizations. Any electronic voice that spoke in favour of the rebels in Syria became a victim of the SEA's wrath. In the past, the group has targeted the Washington Post, the Onion and Reuters.

The SEA's claim of hacking Twitter was yet to be proven true though. A Twitter spokesperson reported that the company already started investigating on the issue. Twitter, one of the most popular social platforms, did not seem to lose its service even though the Web site was apparently under attack on Tuesday.

However, Twitter.com appeared to have been registered under sea@sea.sy for a short period of time. A Twitter account allegedly run by the SEA tweeted that the Web site was owned by the SEA. However, the SEA did not comment regarding their alleged attack on these Web sites.

Digital evidences keep coming to prove that the homepage of the New York Times had actually been hacked. One such evidence showed that the homepage of the Web site was getting redirected to another server which did not belong to the newspaper company. There have also been messages which showed that it was hacked and the connection was closed by one foreign host.

Meanwhile, the Times kept on publishing stories through a workaround which directed its readers to their naked IP http://170.149.168.130/ instead of its homepage.