The New York Times and Twitter had their Internet registrations hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, rendering at least parts of their sites inaccessible.

“Media is going down …” warned the Syrian Electronic Army in a Twitter message before the websites stopped working, adding that it also had taken over Twitter and the Huffington Post U.K.

The Syrian group disrupted traffic to the websites by hacking into registration-services provider Melbourne IT Ltd., which handles the online addresses of nytimes.com and twitter.co.uk, according to Tony Smith, a spokesman for the Melbourne-based company.

A Syrian Electronic Army activist confirmed to The Associated Press that the group hijacked the Times’ and Twitter’s domains by targeting Melbourne IT.

“I can’t say how, but yes we did hit Melbourne IT,” the hacker said in an email. No further details were disclosed.

The hacker’s true identity isn’t publicly known, but he has long used an email address linked to the group, and a second group member has vouched for his credentials.

Some users reported being redirected to the Syrian group’s sites. Many were simply unable to access the pages at all. The Syrian Electronic Army, which backs the country’s president, Bashar al-Assad, has also claimed responsibility for hacking the Washington Post earlier this month and the Financial Times in early May, redirecting readers to its own websites and videos.

“The credentials of a Melbourne IT reseller (username and password) were used to access a reseller account on Melbourne IT’s systems,” Smith wrote in an e-mail. “We are currently reviewing our logs to see if we can obtain information on the identity of the party that has used the reseller credentials, and we will share this information with the reseller and any relevant law-enforcement bodies.”

While the newspaper’s website has been restored, it may take time before all users can get normal access, Smith said.

‘External Attack’

“Our Web site was unavailable to users in the United States for a time on Tuesday,” the New York Times said in a statement. “The disruption was the result of an external attack on our domain name registrar, and we are at work on fully restoring service.”

Accounts with Melbourne IT were compromised in the attack, a person with knowledge of the companies’ investigations said earlier. A Twitter user claiming to represent the SEA posted images of a set of altered domain registrations for the Times, Twitter and the Huffington Post’s U.K. site. The Times data listed a Syrian e-mail address as the administrator’s contact information.

On its website, Twitter said its domain registration provider “experienced an issue in which it appears DNS records for various organizations were modified,” including the twimg.com domain it uses to host images. The original domain record for that site has since been restored, and no user information was affected, it said.

‘Minimal Disruption’

The Huffington Post, owned by AOL Inc., also experienced a hack attempt and “minimal disruption of service,” said Rhoades Alderson, a spokesman for the online publisher.

Security officials at both the New York Times and Twitter are investigating how the hackers were able to alter the domain- registration data, said the person, who wasn’t authorized to speak about the matter and asked not to be identified.

While Twitter’s site was operating normally, twitter.co.uk was inaccessible.

Unidentified hackers hijacked the Associated Press Twitter account in April, sending stock markets down 1 percent in a matter of seconds by posting a false claim of an attack on the White House. The false tweet — saying that President Barack Obama had been injured after his residence was bombed — followed repeated attempts by hackers to gain access to AP reporters’ passwords, the news agency said in a report.

The Times has been increasingly focusing on its website for growth as the industry reels from a print-advertising slump. Digital subscribers to the Times and its international edition increased 35 percent to 699,000 at the end of the last quarter. The company averaged about 14 new paying online readers every hour from the beginning of January to the end of June.

On Aug. 14, the newspaper’s website and e-mail systems crashed for more than two hours because of an internal malfunction with its servers.