The New York Times said its website has been taken down, in what was likely an external malicious attack Tuesday.

(Read more: New York Times suffers outage; Twitter experiencing hiccups, too )

Eileen Murphy, VP of corporate communications, initially reported the outage via Twitter.

While the Times was down, Twitter also experienced some hiccups on its website. A Twitter account for the group of hackers called the Syrian Electronic Army claimed that it had attacked the social media website and changed the ownership listing of Twitter's domain name registration.The same account later posted to Twitter that it had also taken over the registrations for the Times website and for the Huffington Post UK domain.

Twitter told CNBC that it was investigating the issue.

Twitter later issued a status update saying that its Domain Name System (DNS) provider had "experienced an issue in which it appears DNS records for various organizations were modified, including one of Twitter's domains used for image serving, twimg.com." As a result, "Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted."

The outage lasted about an hour and a half but was restored by 7:29pm UTC (3:29pm ET), Twitter said.

"No Twitter user information was affected by this incident," Twitter said.