Is Wikipedia down right now? It was earlier

''Is Wikipedia down right now?'' I hear you ask. It certainly was for a couple of hours on Monday. Cue the usual jokes about kids being unable to do their homework. In IT Blogwatch, it's as if millions of bloggers suddenly cried out in terror.

By Richi Jennings: Your humble blogwatcher curated these bloggy bits for your entertainment. Not to mention: Get your Contoso-branded merchandise while you can...
  
  
My TV tax paid for Aunty Beeb to tell you this:

[It was] inaccessible or extremely sluggish for over two hours beginning at around [11:30 am EDT]. ... Wikipedia ruled out any suggestion of malicious intent. ... [Two] cables, which stretched between Tampa and Virginia, were broken.
...
David Gerard, a UK spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation [said] "Things appear to have been patched up, services are being brought back and things are getting to OK now. ... Someone cut the cables going to the Tampa, Florida data centre."
...
Despite its limited funding, the site is considered to have impressive reliability.      

       
And Kul Bhushan says it wasn't just Wikipedia:

Wikimedia confirmed service disruptions with its API, https services, mail, payments Ubuntu mirror, the Wikimedia blog and more.
...
Earlier, a status web page displayed various Wikimedia services as suffering performance issues. ...pages didn't load properly, stripping out much of the website's content styles and layout. ...the website loaded slowly for some...others complained that the site's homepage was inaccessible.      

 
So Wikimedia's CT Woo 'fesses up:

At about 6:15am PDT, we were alerted to a site issue. ... [We] found severed network connectivity between our two data centers...caused by a fiber cut.
...
While Ashburn [VA] serves most of the traffic, it needs to talk to our Tampa [FL] data center for backend services. ... We do operate two...separate fibers between the data centers. We are now working...to determine how and why we were impacted...when we are supposed to have redundancy in our network.
...
The team worked around the outage by rerouting traffic to Tampa. ... Please see status.wikimedia.org for site availability.      

 
And Josh Halliday is not on holid... err, vacation:

Its last blackout was deliberate, when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales brought the site offline...in protest at [SOPA].
...
The outage is reminiscent of the Georgian woman who inadvertently sliced through an underground cable...cutting off internet services to all of neighbouring Armenia...parts of Georgia and some areas of Azerbaijan.      

 
Meanwhile, Chris King looks on the bright side:

It's just an outage! ... If it was something more permanent, then librarians and teachers all over the world would be dancing round burning effigies of Jimbo Wales and singing "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead".      

 
But Mr Temporary Handle vicariously dons his tinfoil hat:

Our resident conspiracy nut had just suggested that this is the first stage of the US government's operation to destroy Jimbo's power base because of his support for a 'copyright criminal' :)      

      
And Finally...
Get your Contoso-branded merchandise while you can 

Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. He's also the main author of Computerworld's The Long View and IT Blogwatch -- for which he has won ASBPE and Neal awards. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, Richi also publishes a full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.