Skip to content

Chicago Sun-Times Website Struggles After Ebert’s Death

April 4, 2013

By Gilbert Falso :: 4:33 PM

Film critic Roger Ebert is dead, Sun-Times website down.The website of the Chicago Sun-Times, the newspaper that film critic Roger Ebert worked for, is suffering outage issues this afternoon in the wake of the news that Ebert passed away earlier this afternoon.

Ebert passed away at 70, after spending over 45 years reviewing movies for the Sun-Times. His blog site on the Sun-Times website is completely inaccessible this afternoon, and the paper’s main website is very slow to respond.

His death also quickly rocketed to the top of trending topics on Twitter, with the terms “R.I.P.” and “R.I.P. Roger Ebert” topping the list of the social network’s trends shortly after his death was announced, around 2:30 PM Eastern.

After losing his voice to cancer in 2006, Ebert found other ways to communicate, including Twitter.  In a Sun-Times column, Ebert reflected on the way Twitter allowed him to continue having a voice. “There’s something seductive about it: The stream, the flow, the chatter, the sudden bursts of news, the snark, the gossip, time itself tweet-tweet-tweeting away,” he wrote.