Outages Continue at 'New York' Magazine After Alleged DDoS Attack

The website for New York magazine has been on and offline all morning after being taken down by an apparent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack overnight.

The site went down shortly after publishing a bombshell article on Sunday night in which 35 women speak out about being assaulted by the comedian Bill Cosby.

Twitter user Vikingdom2016 is taking credit for the hack, telling Motherboard by direct message on Twitter, "Our team paid for the servers, we used all of these servers to DDoS."

"I've paid $850 but others paid more," Vikingdom2016 added.

Vikingdom2016 first told The Daily Dot the reasoning for hacking the site was not because of the high-profile cover story but due to an apparent deep hatred of New York City. When asked about the motivation for the hack, Vikingdom2016 told Motherboard "its because of the pranks." The hacker previously said the attack on websites with "New York" in the name is revenge for "being pranked" while visiting New York recently.

Vikingom2016 has taken credit for hacks in the past, including one of maine.gov, the website for the state of Maine.

The user also claimed to have wiped out the site's database "which means the site doesn't exist," as Vikingdom2016 tweeted, but it appeared to be back online as of 11:25 AM ET.

A source at New York Magazine told Motherboard that the site and staff email for users on the company's internal network is working fine, but Beverly Johnson, one of the women interviewed for the cover story, tweeted that someone at the magazine had her email hacked as well.

"We aren't just ddosing," Vikingdom2016 told Motherboard. The hacker added that the team is "looking for members that could swat New Yorkers."

"We will destroy many websites soon," Vikingdom2016 said.

When reached for comment, New York Magazine referred us to its statement on Twitter.

Our site is experiencing technical difficulties. We are aware of the issue, and working on a fix.
— New York Magazine (@NYMag) July 27, 2015

As the magazine gets the attack under control, you can still read the archived version of the story online thanks to the Wayback Machine.

Thanks to the Wayback Machine you can still read the @NYMag cover story while the site's down. http://t.co/iZLaLCRfeQ (ht @elongreen)
— Sarah Weinman (@sarahw) July 27, 2015

Update, 2:45 PM: NYmag.com appears to be stable. The alleged hacker says the attack isn't over, however. "Our team is coming back for Nymag.com really soon…" Vikingdom2016 told Motherboard in a Twitter private message.