Full Version: Wikipedia Down
It seems that Wikipedia is down, but only the English version and has been for a while (Mashable, Huffington Post). The twitter chat about it is very interesting, and I've seen no explanation of what happened.
QUOTE(John Limey @ Wed 24th March 2010, 2:07pm) 
It seems that Wikipedia is down, but only the English version and has been for a while (Mashable, Huffington Post). The twitter chat about it is very interesting, and I've seen no explanation of what happened.
It is online -- I just checked out the new featured atrocity...uh, article.
Probably what went down is the DNS (Domain Name Service). If you happened to have a recently cached DNS lookup, the site loaded just fine (as long as the page didn't reference media from a sister site).
Ah, but fr that one shining moment, we had an ever-so-fleeting, ever-so-sweet taste of the World That Might Have Been.
Looks like a DNS issue/router drop somewhere, as depending on the area you're in, it either comes up or not.
For the truly addicted, the following lines can be added to one's local hosts file:
208.80.152.2 en.wikipedia.org
208.80.152.3 upload.wikimedia.org
208.80.152.2 en.wikipedia.org
208.80.152.3 upload.wikimedia.org
Still down for me (UK)
QUOTE
Server not found
Firefox can't find the server at en.wikipedia.org.
Firefox can't find the server at en.wikipedia.org.
From the WP techblog, which is likely unreachable for some of you:
QUOTE
Global Outage (cooling failure and DNS)
Posted by mark in wikimedia on March 24th, 2010
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.
Posted by mark in wikimedia on March 24th, 2010
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.
Exquisite FAIL.
I wonder if this is related to lists.wikimedia.org being dead.
They're in good company, though; over 50% of corporations have no meaningful IT disaster planning.
QUOTE(Basil @ Wed 24th March 2010, 1:50pm)
Exquisite FAIL.
Wikimedia IT is barely competent. While they do a good job of throwing excessively large amounts of hardware at their grotesquely inefficient software, they have very poor disaster planning and apparently don't do test runs, either. They're in good company, though; over 50% of corporations have no meaningful IT disaster planning.
At least they bother to report the failures that turn up in the wake of unplanned, accidental breaching experiments.
QUOTE(carbuncle @ Wed 24th March 2010, 11:44am)
From the WP techblog, which is likely unreachable for some of you:
QUOTE
Global Outage (cooling failure and DNS)
Posted by mark in wikimedia on March 24th, 2010
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.
Posted by mark in wikimedia on March 24th, 2010
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.
Interesting. I can reach it by going through the main-main page, THEN to en.wiki, but not directly from en.wiki.
Once on, a lot of the image/files in the articles do not show for me. That must be related to the caching problem.
QUOTE(Somey @ Wed 24th March 2010, 6:17pm)
Ah, but fr that one shining moment, we had an ever-so-fleeting, ever-so-sweet taste of the World That Might Have Been.
Ah, the sound of a thousand admins in anguish because they were wanting to block someone into submission to make up for a life that did not amount to their expectations but they were left without that ability for a few moments.
apparently the secure server was receiving too much overflow so they shut it down too =\
...meaning I'm unable to complete my application for a free trip to Poland!
...meaning I'm unable to complete my application for a free trip to Poland!
QUOTE(Basil @ Wed 24th March 2010, 2:50pm)
Exquisite FAIL.
Good thing they stuff about 40% of their revenues in the bank, rather than spend on technology that easily 80% of donors think is the target of their donation!
... and we have reception (for the time being). Most of the blogs have been having a chuckle about it, which was fairly entertaining.
User:Bigtimepeace/WikipediaDownMarch2010
Bigtimepeace put together a set of Twitter "tweets" during the time of the tech problems. It's...quite entertaining to read.
Bigtimepeace put together a set of Twitter "tweets" during the time of the tech problems. It's...quite entertaining to read.
QUOTE(Anonymous editor @ Wed 24th March 2010, 8:46pm)
QUOTE(Apathetic @ Wed 24th March 2010, 4:01pm)
apparently the secure server was receiving too much overflow so they shut it down too =\
...meaning I'm unable to complete my application for a free trip to Poland!
What?...meaning I'm unable to complete my application for a free trip to Poland!
[Moderator's note: about seven zero-content posts were deleted.]
Wikipedia-watch.org picked up some extra eyeballs due to Wikipedia's problem. The usual of about 550 home-page visitors per day jumped to 4632 yesterday. That's because www.wikipedia-watch.org ranks about 8 on Google in a search for the single word "wikipedia." When they couldn't reach Wikipedia, they tried "wikipedia" on Google, and figured that Wikipedia-Watch might have some breaking news about this happy occasion. After all, isn't a "watch" site supposed to be watching? 
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