The New York Times� website was inaccessible Tuesday afternoon in its second major disruption this month, with a group calling itself �The Syrian Electronic Army� claiming responsibility.

Visitors who visited the NYTimes.com website got error messages, although the page remained up on its Internet protocol address, 170.149.168.130 . Many of the site�s links also didn�t work because they relied on the NYTimes.com domain name. The cause was unknown, but the behavior was consistent with a hacking attack that hijacks control of a site from its administrators.

Times officials did not immediately return phone and email messages for comment. In a Twitter message, Times spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said the cause was a �malicious external attack.�

Two weeks ago, the Times� website suffered an outage that the company blamed on a server problem.

The Syrian Electronic Army has taken credit for a string of Web attacks on media targets it sees as sympathetic to Syria�s rebels.

The group said in a Twitter message Tuesday that it also took over Twitter and Huffington Post U.K.

Twitter spokeswoman Christina Thiry said the company is looking into the claims.

Michael Fey, a chief technology officer at Santa Clara, Calif. based cybersecurity firm McAfee, said Tuesday that as long as media organizations play a critical role as influencers and critics, they will continue to be targets of cyber-attacks.

He said the battle tactics are broad, from denial of service attacks, to targeted attacks using social engineering and to deploying information-gathering Trojans.

�Regardless of technology or tactics deployed, we should expect to see more of these attacks,� he said.

FBI spokeswoman Jenny Shearer at the Washington D.C. headquarters said the agency has no comment on the attack.

(AP)