Wikipedia Down, Wikipedia Encyclopedia Outage

Did you try to access wikipedia.com and wikipedia.org at around 2:45 p.m. ET? Did you get error messages? Wikipedia was down Wednesday afternoon due to overheating problem at the online encyclopedia’s European data center.

The wiki blog posted something about the outage:

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.

UPDATE: It appeared that Wikipedia was back online as of about 4:30 p.m. ET.