A "data center issue" caused a brief outage of the New York Times website on Thursday afternoon (EDT).

The company's spokeswoman Eileen Murphy said, "It was a very minor thing," about the outage that lasted about 15 minutes. "It was fixed very quickly." She declined to provide any further details on exact cause of the incident.

The outage affected people who were in the New York Times building in New York and people elsewhere, who were on the news website at the time of the outage.

The company's tech team resolved the outage by switching application services to a back-up data center in Seattle. According to Murphy, the issue occurred in the Times' primary data center in New York.