Comments for Wikipedia Outage?

Wikipedia Outage?

2008-01-09T18:51:15Z

I was researching some info on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/) and then the website died. Murphy's Law. I tried both over a T3 line and an EVDO connection and both pages timed out. I've never seen Wipipedia have an outage. Anyone else having problems?

Update: 1:56pm
Looks like it was at least a 3 minute outage. Could have been longer, since I was googling a keyword along with the word "wiki" to try and find the wiki page. I then clicked through from Google and the Wikipedia page timed out. So the outage could have been longer.

Comment from David Gerard on 2008-01-09

2008-01-09T22:31:19Z

Uh, yep. You know the bit where we spent the last few months begging donations? We mean it :-(

That said, downtime is our most profitable product ;-) We've been doing a lot better in the last year or so ...

Comment from David Gerard on 2008-01-10

2008-01-11T00:22:15Z

You emailed me asking what caused the outage. I emailed back and it bounced ...

I have no idea what actually caused this one :-) I presume something hiccupped ... if it'd gone on more than a few minutes I expect I'd have gone asking.

This used to happen a LOT more - hence "downtime is our most profitable product" - which really means, you can have ads or you can have the occasional downtime - but our valiant genius sysadmins have worked wonders at extracting reliability from gaffer tape and string.

For how it all works, Domas Mituzas wrote an excellent State Of Technology 2007 post:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2008-January/035729.html

For the technical guts, see this (we're doing things with MySQL no-one except Google is doing):

http://dammit.lt/uc/workbook2007.pdf