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UPDATE: Wikipedia goes dark

It seems that online encyclopedia Wikipedia has gone down.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

It seems that online encyclopedia Wikipedia has gone down.

No word at present as to why the site has gone dark.

If you've got a term paper due soon, let's hope it comes back up real soon you might have to cut'n'paste out of a dead-tree encyclopedia.

More info when it becomes available ...

[UPDATE: According to Wikimedia technical blog the outgate has been caused by overheating at the European data center followed by a DNS issue.

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.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

A reminder that Wikipeda is available via cached pages stored on Google.]

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