Wikipedia experienced major service outages today that took the popular free reference site down for roughly 2 hours, beginning at around 1:00 PM EST.
According to a Facebook blog post, the outage has been attributed to overheating at the site's European data center.
The servers shut down, which ultimately led to more issues:
"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," the site said in a statement. "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.
Wikipedia resolved most of the problems by 3:00 PM EST, according to the site's official Twitter account. Due to continued overheating at the Amsterdam data center, however, users may still be experiencing service glitches.
