Wikipedia suffered 2 hour outage after Fiber cables are cut

Wikipedia is a top 10 world website whichever statistics you use. So its a really big deal when Wikipedia suffers nearly 2 hours of downtime. The 2 hour outage occurred at 14:30 GMT to 16:30 GMT on the 6th of August. The reason according to Wikipedia is that the Fiber cables running close the the Wikipedia datacenters in Florida were cut by careless builders. Associated services became slow at best, but for most they were unreachable.

“Someone cut the cables going to the Tampa, Florida data centre. We have two big [centres], one in Florida and one in Virginia, and some network proxies in Amsterdam. Everyone in that data center was affected,” said David Gerard, a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation

The cables were repaired in just over an hour (66 minutes to be exact) although it took another hour on top of that to return services to normal. Wikipedia was quick to rule out any possibility of the outage being the result of a malicious act.

Despite being a non-profit organisation with limited funds, Wikimedia, the foundation responsible for running the site has an impressive record of uptime and is visited daily by millions of users seeking information from its vast libraries of content. 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 January.

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