Wikipedia Is Mostly Down Due to Database Problems

Wikipedia is currently experiencing problems and can be unavailable at times. The site has tracked down the issue to a filled-up hard drive and is currently looking at ways to resolve this.

“At 10:57 UTC, the master database server for s3 (the cluster that holds most of our wikis) had a full disk and stopped writing. For this reason it’s no longer possible to edit these wikis. Because all slave servers for s3 stopped as a result, these wikis are now running read-only from a single server, which means you’ll probably see lots of database errors even when just reading,” the site explains.

“The larger wikis live on separate clusters and are not affected. For details on which wikis are affected, see below. We are working on resolving this issue as fast as we can,” the announcement added.

As Wikipedia explains, the problem is rather trivial yet, for a site its size, it proved critical. Since there is no more space on the hard drive, new entries can’t be written to the database. This means that any attempts to write data will fail. This doesn’t relate only to editing articles or adding new ones, any action that would be logged and added to the database won’t work. Right now, even logging it doesn’t work.

Some sections of the site are accessible and most of the individual entries work. The main wikipedia.org page though doesn’t load. Wikipedia provides a list of wikis that are not entirely down, though you may experience problems on them as well: bg.wikipedia.org, bg.wiktionary.org, commons.wikimedia.org, cs.wikipedia.org, de.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org, en.wikiquote.org, en.wiktionary.org, eo.wikipedia.org, fi.wikipedia.org, fr.wikipedia.org, id.wikipedia.org, it.wikipedia.org, ja.wikipedia.org, nl.wikipedia.org, no.wikipedia.org, pl.wikipedia.org, pt.wikipedia.org, ru.wikipedia.org, sv.wikipedia.org, th.wikipedia.org, tr.wikipedia.org, zh.wikipedia.org.

There’s no word on when you can expect the site to be back up and running as it should.