Power Failure Brings Down Wikipedia

People wanting to visit Wikipedia, or any other site associated with the Wikimedia foundation which runs the online encyclopedia, several hours ago were greeted by an error message. All the sites, including the top ten web destination Wikipedia, were down due to what were later revealed to be power failures at its data center in the US. The sites are now back up and running as expected.

“Starting at 0:10 UTC on July 5th, the Wikimedia Foundation suffered from intermittent, partial power failures in the internal power network of one of its main data centers in Tampa, Florida. Due to the temporary unavailability of several critical systems and the large impact on the available systems capacity, all Wikimedia projects went down,” Wikimedia explained on its Technical Blog.

“The power situation stabilized at 1:12 UTC, and systems and services recovery has been taking place since. We expect all projects to be back online and editable around 4:00 UTC,” the blog post added.

As usual, Twitter quickly became agitated with the news of the outage which lasted for a few hours. The site started recovering after about an hour of downtime, but there were still problems accessing the site. Fittingly, Wikimedia kept its users up to date using Twitter as well, tweeting: “Thanks for being patient, everyone. We've figured out the problem: power outage in our Florida data center. Slowly coming back online!,” several hours ago.

Wikipedia has a pretty good record when it comes to uptime, the last time when it was largely unavailable being in March. On that occasion, overheating in the European data center resulted in traffic being redirected to the US one. A bug in the failover procedure, however, made the site completely unavailable worldwide. The good news is that Wikimedia is working on a new US data center, to supplement the existing ones, which should make it it easier for the site to handle high traffic and issues that may arise.