Twitter is pumping out reports that Wikipedia has been down worldwide for nearly an hour, and if you travel to wikipedia.org or another Wikimedia property, you’ll get confirmation in the form of a message saying, “Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.”
This is just a few hours after both the iTunes Store and YouTube were hacked, so it would seem that in addition to Independence Day for the United States, today is Disaster Day for the Internet.
Wikipedia last experienced a major bout of downtime this March. That outage occurred when a European datacenter overheated, forcing Wikimedia to use backups in Florida. Unfortunately, the transition process caused a DNS resolution problem that made all of the organization’s websites inaccessible — including Wikipedia.
As for this outage, we haven’t seen any explanation from Wikimedia as to why the sites are down today, but we’ll keep you posted if one is given, or when the sites return to normal operation. So far the organization has simply tweeted, “We’re aware that the site isn’t working as usual and we’re figuring out the problem now. We’ll let you know more soon!”
UPDATE: The Wikipedia Twitter account was just updated with this message: “Thanks for being patient, everyone. We’ve figured out the problem: power outage in our Florida data center. Slowly coming back online!”
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