As The New York Times struggled to get its site back online, the paper turned to often ephemeral social media to put out its stories. Earlier on Wednesday, the site began suffering unknown technical difficulties, pulling it completely offline for over an hour. Unfortunately, while the outage wasn’t long, it was enough to threaten reporting of one of the week’s biggest stories: a violent clash in Egypt that left over a hundred people — and possibly many more — dead. To get out news of the Cairo protests, the Times turned to a system that’s usually supplemental: posting updates on social media. For the next hour, the account tweeted news from Egypt, but as the site remained down, full stories began being published — this time as long updates on the Times’ Facebook page. While live-tweeting is a common way to break news, under normal circumstances, social media is a way to draw people into a site, not a substitute.