The Web site of The New York Times was off-line for about two hours on Wednesday in what company officials say was a failure during regular maintenance of NYTimes.com and not the result of a cyberattack.

“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 for The New York Times Company.

The site went down about 11:10 a.m.. It returned around 1:15 p.m., but service was sporadic. New articles were being published again by about 3 p.m. The failure took place during the peak hours for traffic to the site, between 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Ms. Murphy said, adding that the site had more than 7.1 million visits on Monday.

In January, The Times reported that Chinese hackers had repeatedly attacked NYTimes.com and had obtained passwords for some reporters and other employees before being repelled by computer experts working for the company. Ms. Murphy said that based on what experts examining the failure on Wednesday had seen, there was “no reason to believe this was the result of a cyberattack.”