Wikipedia Down: Affects Millions Worldwide

Today millions of people need to access the World Wide Web on a daily basis and the email and search related services are required by them every now and then. That explains why the breakdown of such services can put a stop to their workflow and activities. Yesterday, the wiki users got a taste of the service breakdown and the Wikipedia site problem took the users by surprise. The Wiki site is accessed by millions of users for various purposes and they saw red when the site could not be accessed. It took them a while to understand what was going on. Later, the confusion was clear and the users got to know that the breakdown was triggered by a server overheating problem.

The Wikipedia European Data center got overheated and a number of Wiki servers closed down the service to stop damage to the data bank. This problem resulted in a DNS resolution failure which thwarted the attempts of the Wiki team that was trying to divert the traffic to other running servers. The users who got a 'server not found' message posted in their social networking accounts and tried to sort out the reason. Some people feared that it could be a hacking attack.


The Wikipedia team did not waste time and repaired the problem real fast. The Facebook page of Wikipedia hinted that some users may suffer from problems for a brief period. The Wikipedia outage made the users realize how desperately they need the online encyclopedia for their work.

source : http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/wikipedia-down-affects-millions-worldwide/