(REUTERS) - The website of The New York Times experienced another outage on Tuesday afternoon, likely caused by hackers, the company said.

New York Times Co spokeswoman Eileen Murphy tweeted on Tuesday that the "issue is most likely the result of a malicious external attack," based on an initial assessment.

This is the second time the Times has experienced problems with its website in two weeks. On Aug 14, the site was down for several hours, an outage likely related to a scheduled maintenance update that occurred within seconds of the website's going down.

Several media organisation have been attacked by hackers in recent months. Also in August, hackers promoting the Syrian Electronic Army simultaneously targeted websites belonging to CNN, Time and the Washington Post by breaching a third party service used by those sites.

Dow Jones Chief Executive Lex Fenwick tweeted on Tuesday that The Wall Street Journal's website is "free to all for a few hours," a poke at the Journal's crosstown rival.