Thaindian News

New York, Mar 24 (THAINDIAN NEWS) The world’s greatest online encyclopedia – Wikipedia is down since quite some time. And the most surprising bit is that, it is working fine for some users, whereas it is down for the others. The users for which it is not working get the message ‘Server Not Found.’ Since it is quite an important website, so its downtime has caused quite a huge furor in the online world. There is a big uproar on the popular micro blogging and social networking site Twitter, where people are constantly complaining about its downtime.

As of writing this news article, http://en.wikipedia.org was working fine for the 3 writers of Thaindian News who were on duty at the moment. While we haven’t experienced the outage first hand, initial analysis suggest a nameserver outage. The nameservers assigned to wikipedia.org are NS0.WIKIMEDIA.ORG, NS1.WIKIMEDIA.ORG and NS2.WIKIMEDIA.ORG. And it appears that NS2.WIKIMEDIA.ORG is down.

According to downforeveryoneorjustme.com wikipedia is not down.

There has been no update from Wikipedia officials regarding the downtime problem.

Do let us know via comments wether you are able to access wikipedia or not.

UPDATE(2:53pm EST) : Wikimedia has released the following information on their technical blog.

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.