Twitter and The New York Times were hit with cyber attacks. A group backing embattled Syrian strongman Bashar breached the Australian Internet company that manages many major site addresses. The Times site remained out of service early Wednesday following the attacks that began Tuesday.

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) used Twitter to tout its efforts to take down the messaging service and the Times news website.

"Media is going down," a message at the SEA Twitter account proclaimed. "Twitter, are you ready?"

The cyber attack was evidently aimed at the Domain Name System that that acts as a directory of sorts for routing online traffic to website addresses.

"Our DNS provider 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," Twitter said in a post at its status blog.

"Viewing of images and photos was sporadically impacted," the San Francisco-based company's message explained.

The trouble was resolved within two hours, according to Twitter.

The New York Times said that its website went down Tuesday due to a "malicious external attack."

NYT's Twitter account said after 2000 GMT that the website "is experiencing technical difficulties" but that news was still being published via Twitter and other links.