Wikipedia Isn't Loading

[Guy]

I know this may sound slightly newbish, but, as of today, Wikipedia just isn't loading. I asked a few of my friends and they've told me that they haven't had a single problem with it today. However, as soon as I click the link for Wikipedia, it instantly comes up with 'Server not found' on my Firefox. I can access any site other than Wikipedia though.

Is this happening to anyone else or is there some solution to the problem?

[Swagger]

yea, i also got it

[D.B. Cooper]

It's back for me now, but earlier the formatting was all messed up.

[Maximinus Thrax]

Is this happening to anyone else or is there some solution to the problem?

Same problem, Firefox user as well.

[erasmus777]

I can access it just fine. Open a Command Terminal. Type in "ping www.wikipedia.org". If ping tells you that there were 0 packets lost, there's a software problem. If the packets are lost, it's a connection problem.

[Markas]

It was down but seems to be okay now. Using IE.

[War&Politics]

Still not working for me on Firefox or IE. I don't get any error messages either. It just won't work. Also, I pinged it and the pings got through fine! What's up?

[Yorkshireman]

I can't access it either, I downloaded an update for IE8 today.

[War&Politics]

I saw the update but didn't download it. I did update Firefox though.

[erasmus777]

Have you tried using a proxy? E.g. http://www.freeproxyserver.net/ (Don't do anything that requires a password while using a public proxy)

[Simetrical]

Wikipedia was down for everyone today for a while. You can read this blog post about it: Global Outage (cooling failure and DNS)

Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries.

However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects.


We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

Edit: Someone in #wikimedia-tech on freenode linked to the Twitter posts about Wikipedia. A new way to tell if big sites are really down, I guess.

[Jaketh]

and this is why you live in america