Wikipedia Down Due to Scheduled Maintenance

Wikipedia, one of the largest and most visited sites in the world, is currently unavailable for most users, with the site displaying an error message. As you'd expect, Twitter is alright, with many predicting doom and gloom, but very little actual information, the real-time web at its finest. In fact, the downtime is part of the scheduled outage caused by a problem in one of the main data centers Wikipedia uses in Florida.

“Due to a problem in one of our core routers in our Tampa cluster we need to perform some network maintenance tomorrow, Friday July 31st around 12:00 UTC. We will be performing a software upgrade and reboot of the router. This should not take more than a few minutes if everything goes well. Unfortunately this means that practically all sites and services will be down during that time,” Mark Bergsma, System & Network administrator, Wikimedia Foundation, wrote yesterday in the Wikipedia mailing list.

The problem originated earlier this week in one of the routers at the data center, which had a faulty line card. The replacement failed to boot properly after hot-plugging, so the administrators decided to reboot the entire system, upgrading the firmware in the process. The outage was only supposed to last a few minutes.

At the time, both Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation and other associated sites are unavailable, with the generic error message displayed saying, “Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. This is probably temporary and should be fixed soon. Please try again in a few minutes.”

The downtime was scheduled to take place at 12:00 UTC and was supposed to only last several minutes. However, almost an hour later, the site still isn't available, most likely due to unforeseen complications. Further information isn't available at the moment, but we'll update you as it comes in.

UPDATE: Wikipedia and all the other Wikimedia sites are now up and working properly after two hours of downtime.