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Wikipedia Explains Today's Global Outage

Posted by timothy on from the citation-you-requested dept.

gnujoshua writes "The Wikimedia Tech Blog has a post explaining why many users were unable to reach Wikimedia sites due to DNS resolution failure. The article states, 'Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries. However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects."

2 of 153 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Do we accept this... by afabbro · · Score: 0, Troll

    Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.

    Wow - is that the worst sig on Slashdot or what?

    • "Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle..." The sysadmins or their affairs? And why would subtle affairs (or subtle sysadmins) be either significant or threatening? Oh my God, he's...he's...SUBTLE! RUN!
    • "..and quick to anger." Angry affairs? Angry sysadmins?
    • And to top it off, your URL points to a slimey affiliate site that promotes "Free Advertising System" and "Copy the Super Affiliates".
    --
    Advice: on VPS providers
  2. Re:Jokes aside, how do you feel when you lost Wiki by owlnation · · Score: 1, Troll

    It was though there was a great calming came over the Force. Like the dawning of a new age, one based on freedom and facts. One where people were free to write articles without fear of deletion and condemnation. Or edit articles without fear of biased reversion, or banishment.

    Suddenly people saw the wood from the trees, and realized there was an whole Internet out there with truth and beauty in it, where jack-booted book-burners were not only not in control, but not welcome either.

    And then they brought wikipedia back up again; the black flags flew, and the click of heels was once again heard around the net.

    Jokes aside. Indeed, I wish I were joking. There is a lot of pure evil at the heart of Wikipedia.