New York Magazine Site Crashes Hours After Bill Cosby Cover Release

A hacker claims he's to blame.

Hours after New York Magazine revealed its latest cover, featuring a powerful image of 35 women who have accused Bill Cosby of sexual abuse, the magazine's website went down. A hacker claimed responsibility for the crash and said he did it because of his hatred for New York City.

NY Mag tweeted early Monday that the site was having technical difficulties.

A self-proclaimed hacker using the alias ThreatKing told The Daily Dot he overloaded the site's servers with traffic by using "a distributed denial-of-service attack." He said he did not do it because of the Cosby cover, but rather because of a bad experience he had when he visited the city two months ago.

"Many stupid people at [sic] New York," he told The Daily Dot via Skype chat. "I have not even seen the cover, LOL."

Twitter user Vikingdom2016 tweeted about the site crash Monday as well, and made reference to ThreatKing.

Around noon, the site went back online, according to The New York Times, but was inaccessible minutes later.

Jada Yuan, a NY Mag writer, tweeted that people should not be tweeting the link of the archived version of the interviewed.

A NY Mag spokesperson was not immediately available to comment on the incident, but the company referred Twitter followers to its Instagram account to hear clips from some of the victims' interviews and later posted the entire article on Tumblr.

A video posted by New York Magazine (@nymag) on

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