5 ms·

Wikipedia website suffers global outage

32 points by Rabidgremlin 16y ago

johnfn 16y ago
How did that article manage to shift from a report of outage to an editorial on why Wikipedia is bad for college research?
- seancron 16y ago
  And why is the entire second page quotes from Twitter about it, and the link to the "latest discussions about the outage" a Twitter search for "wikipedia"?
  - chrismsnz 16y ago
    Welcome to what passes for the mainstream media here in New Zealand.
    - mahmud 16y ago
      The media crisis befalls both Trans-Tasman nations. SBS did a segment on news broadcasts across NSW and found out most "breaking news" segments were recorded days in advance, and in one session where the announcer deliberately changes outfits. Viewers would wait for updates on bushfires and other similar regional crises and they would be "updated" on news about the flavor of the month, rapist footie player leaving a nightclub or doing shopping. American media, however, is as efficient and fervent for their corporate sponsors as any militant death-squad. In America, the footie player's ethnic origin would be researched and the rape case made into a race-war, or the victim tied to a political party in some fringe manner.
  - duskwuff 16y ago
    When in doubt, pad the article with meaningless fluff?
  - Rabidgremlin 16y ago
    It looks like the article has been edited. Originally it basically said "Wikipedia is down. Twitter told us. See..." Figure they just left them in as filler when they did the update. Not to mention they get that all important page 2 click so they can show you some more ads :)
- Qz 16y ago
  Funny, I was literally trying to use it for college research when it went out -- had to resort to text-only google cache.
- codingthewheel 16y ago
  If you look at the timestamps and the tweets, this was one of the first sites to publish the "scoop". A few others followed eg: http://news.google.com/news/search?hl=en&q=wikipedia+is+down http://news.google.com/news/search?hl=en&q=wikipedia+is+... It's obviously been years since we've seen a story of this magnitude.
macros 16y ago
The perils of only having one datacenter :(
- hga 16y ago
  I was reading some item (on HN probably) about how they have a big one in Tampa, Florida, a small one in Amsterdam and are planning on building another big one in Virginia. That said, the article mentioned a time when a failure in Amsterdam lead to a failure to fall over to Florida which took out the whole service for a good while.
  - CapitalistCartr 16y ago
    I live in Tampa. We are the Lightning Capitol of North America {insert Wikipedia link here}. Right now is the rainy season here, and generous amounts of lightning. It's basically the monsoon season. So the power sucks here, and even if you have excellent generators, as Home Shopping Network does, the network connectivity is still bound by local limitations. Tampa is a terrible place to put a data center.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      I think it's there for historical reasons, because Jimmy Wales used to live there, so his company was there, and now it's a significant project to move everything.
      - CapitalistCartr 16y ago
        It's well worth doing. Putting a datacenter in Tampa is like putting a lighter factory in the middle of the fireworks district.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - _delirium 16y ago
    According to this, it looks like all the db servers are in the Tampa datacenter, with Amsterdam (and formerly Seoul) just having miscellaneous utility servers, backups, and a bunch of Squid proxies: http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_roles http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_roles Looks like way too few servers in the Amsterdam cluster to fail over to anyway, even if they were set up for it: the Tampa datacenter has over 400 servers, versus Amsterdam's 44.
sliverstorm 16y ago
Dear commenter: Wikipedia down? No, that's not just like Google going down.
ars 16y ago
I still think they should have taken up googles offer to host them for free, no strings attached, http://www.technewsworld.com/story/tech/google-wikipedia-hosting-40554.html http://www.technewsworld.com/story/tech/google-wikipedia-hos... http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_hosting http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_hosting http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_offers_to_help_Wikipedia http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_offers_to_help_Wikipedia
- mkramlich 16y ago
  i can understand why Google would want to host them. for both philanthropic and also potentially very selfish reasons. either way works!
- kierank 16y ago
  Yahoo gave them some server space in Seoul at one point.
ramchip 16y ago
I think some articles lately are too "news" and not enough "hacker". There's very, very little information in this article, and Wikipedia being down for a little while isn't especially intellectually stimulating.

32 points by Rabidgremlin 16y ago

How did that article manage to shift from a report of outage to an editorial on why Wikipedia is bad for college research?

seancron 16y ago
And why is the entire second page quotes from Twitter about it, and the link to the "latest discussions about the outage" a Twitter search for "wikipedia"?
- chrismsnz 16y ago
  Welcome to what passes for the mainstream media here in New Zealand.
  - mahmud 16y ago
    The media crisis befalls both Trans-Tasman nations. SBS did a segment on news broadcasts across NSW and found out most "breaking news" segments were recorded days in advance, and in one session where the announcer deliberately changes outfits. Viewers would wait for updates on bushfires and other similar regional crises and they would be "updated" on news about the flavor of the month, rapist footie player leaving a nightclub or doing shopping. American media, however, is as efficient and fervent for their corporate sponsors as any militant death-squad. In America, the footie player's ethnic origin would be researched and the rape case made into a race-war, or the victim tied to a political party in some fringe manner.
- duskwuff 16y ago
  When in doubt, pad the article with meaningless fluff?
- Rabidgremlin 16y ago
  It looks like the article has been edited. Originally it basically said "Wikipedia is down. Twitter told us. See..." Figure they just left them in as filler when they did the update. Not to mention they get that all important page 2 click so they can show you some more ads :)
Qz 16y ago
Funny, I was literally trying to use it for college research when it went out -- had to resort to text-only google cache.
codingthewheel 16y ago
If you look at the timestamps and the tweets, this was one of the first sites to publish the "scoop". A few others followed eg: http://news.google.com/news/search?hl=en&q=wikipedia+is+down http://news.google.com/news/search?hl=en&q=wikipedia+is+... It's obviously been years since we've seen a story of this magnitude.

macros 16y ago

The perils of only having one datacenter :(

hga 16y ago
I was reading some item (on HN probably) about how they have a big one in Tampa, Florida, a small one in Amsterdam and are planning on building another big one in Virginia. That said, the article mentioned a time when a failure in Amsterdam lead to a failure to fall over to Florida which took out the whole service for a good while.
- CapitalistCartr 16y ago
  I live in Tampa. We are the Lightning Capitol of North America {insert Wikipedia link here}. Right now is the rainy season here, and generous amounts of lightning. It's basically the monsoon season. So the power sucks here, and even if you have excellent generators, as Home Shopping Network does, the network connectivity is still bound by local limitations. Tampa is a terrible place to put a data center.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    I think it's there for historical reasons, because Jimmy Wales used to live there, so his company was there, and now it's a significant project to move everything.
    - CapitalistCartr 16y ago
      It's well worth doing. Putting a datacenter in Tampa is like putting a lighter factory in the middle of the fireworks district.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- _delirium 16y ago
  According to this, it looks like all the db servers are in the Tampa datacenter, with Amsterdam (and formerly Seoul) just having miscellaneous utility servers, backups, and a bunch of Squid proxies: http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_roles http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Server_roles Looks like way too few servers in the Amsterdam cluster to fail over to anyway, even if they were set up for it: the Tampa datacenter has over 400 servers, versus Amsterdam's 44.

sliverstorm 16y ago

Dear commenter: Wikipedia down? No, that's not just like Google going down.

ars 16y ago

I still think they should have taken up googles offer to host them for free, no strings attached, http://www.technewsworld.com/story/tech/google-wikipedia-hosting-40554.html http://www.technewsworld.com/story/tech/google-wikipedia-hos... http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_hosting http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Google_hosting http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_offers_to_help_Wikipedia http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Google_offers_to_help_Wikipedia

mkramlich 16y ago
i can understand why Google would want to host them. for both philanthropic and also potentially very selfish reasons. either way works!
kierank 16y ago
Yahoo gave them some server space in Seoul at one point.

ramchip 16y ago

I think some articles lately are too "news" and not enough "hacker". There's very, very little information in this article, and Wikipedia being down for a little while isn't especially intellectually stimulating.