An apparent data center outage has put Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced encyclopedia, under for about two hours now. Visiting the site gives a user an error message, “Meta has a problem. Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties.”
Steven Walling, a Wikipedia volunteer (and former ReadWriteWeb reporter), explains in a comment on NextWeb.
“What happened with the last outage was that a heating issue killed one of the two datacenters (the one in Amsterdam), and the increased pressure from handling all the traffic eventually brought down the servers in Florida too. The good news is that it’s part of the Wikimedia Foundation’s plan to open up a new U.S. data center to prevent this in the future. Also, to make a plug, donating helps pay to keep the servers up and running”
About 20 minutes ago, Wikipedia Tweeted that “data is slowly coming back online.”
