New York Times website returns online

The newspaper continued to tweet news after going offline

The New York Times says it believes that an "internal issue" was the cause of its website going offline for about an hour.

The paper continued to tweet and post stories to Facebook during the failure.

"The outage occurred within seconds of a scheduled maintenance update, which we believe was the cause," said a spokeswoman.

The Wall Street Journal made its website free-to-access for two hours, but indicated this was a coincidence.

"We did it so that people could keep up with the breaking news coming out of Egypt," said a spokeswoman.

One blogger joked about the incident: "If the The New York Times' website is going to go down like this, they really should have some kind of offline edition or something."

Broadcaster Fox Business initially reported that sources had told it the NYT was under "cyberattack".

However, it later quoted a security expert who said it was indeed possible the problem was an internal "glitch".