Online encyclopedia Wikipedia suffered an outage about 14:30 GMT for two hours yesterday after two important fiber cables close to one of their datacenters in Florida were coincidently cut, consequently in the site and its related services running very sluggish and in some cases getting completely inaccessible.
“Someone cut down the cables passing to the Tampa, Florida data centre. We possess two big [centres], one in Florida and other one in Virginia and some network proxies in Amsterdam. Everyone in that data center was directly affected, as told by David Gerard, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation in a BBC statement.
The cables between the two datacenters were repaired in about one hour, although it carry out another hour before common service to the popular website resumed. Wikipedia was suddenly rule out any possibility of the outage being the result of a harmful act, though at the time it was still not clear what had caused the incident.
Concerned visitors fastly get accessed to Twitter to voice their concerns. “Wikipedia is down. I do not accept any aknowledge anything anymore,” tweeted Guillermo Esteves. Wikimedia also released a statement saying, “we are having some major technical elements, but our engineers are working on it. We will be back soon!”
Despite being a non profit with restricted funds, Wikimedia, the foundation liable for operating the site has a sound record of uptime and is visited daily by millions getting information from its vast libraries of content. In real sense, the last time the site suffered any downtime was intentional, when it blacked out its English website for 24 hours in protest of SOPA in Jan.
