Previous Story: EBay eyes open source for development software
Next Story: Hackers post Paris Hilton's address book online

Power outage pulls plug on Wikipedia
By Sumner Lemon

A power outage inside the facility that hosts Wikipedia's servers has forced the free, community-authored encyclopedia offline, according to a message posted on the Wikipedia Web site.

At approximately 2:15 p.m. PST on Monday, circuit breakers were tripped inside the colocation facility that houses Wikipedia's servers, taking out power to places inside the facility, the statement said. After several minutes, most of Wikipedia's servers and the switch that connects these servers and links them to the network had rebooted, it said.

Most of the servers quickly came back online, however, Wikipedia's MySQL database had been corrupted by the power outage, the statement said. Currently, Wikipedia is backing up copies the raw data stored in its 170G-byte database and is running recovery procedures, it said.

The statement did not say when the Wikipedia encyclopedia would be available again. In the meantime, the statement referred users looking for information to use cached versions of the Web site available through Google Inc.'s search engine.

Posted February 22, 2005 05:14 PM |