Wikipedia hit by network outage

post from Ubergizmo on 06 August 2012 02:17:15 PM. © Ubergizmo

I was about to search for more information regarding the updated OpenGL this morning via Wikipedia when I noticed that it didn’t return any search results. It turns out that the world’s beloved free online encyclopedia has experienced a technical outage. Basically, I noticed an error message on the site’s homepage (seen above) saying that Wikipedia servers are experiencing some sort of a technical problem. The outage, which lasted for about an hour and a half, started around 6:30 AM PST and it was finally restored by 8:30 AM PST.

Wikipedia confirmed the outage via Twitter, saying, “We’re having some technical issues, but our engineers are working on it. We’ll be back soon!” If you’ll check out Wikipedia’s Performance and Availability History, you’ll notice several service disruptions on its API, https services, Images and media, Mail (SMTP), and many others. A Wikimedia spokesperson has confirmed in a statement that the outage was due to some networking issues with its servers in Tampa, Florida. When asked if the site has been recently hacked or attack, the spokesperson denied the assumption saying, “We certainly haven’t been hit by a denial of service attack.”

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