Wikipedia back online after outage

05/07/2010 11:25:00

Information-sharing website Wikipedia is back online after a power outage at its data centre in Florida caused servers to overheat and shut down.

Information-sharing website Wikipedia is back online after a power outage at its data centre in Florida caused servers to overheat and shut down.

The web-based encyclopedia used Twitter to let users know it was working on the problem which affected services around the globe.

Bosses later issued an update which said Wikipedia was "slowly" coming back online as the problem appeared to have been solved.

Liam Wyatt, vice president of Wikimedia Australia, confirmed in his own Twitter feed that the problem was due to the failure of air conditioners at the data centre, causing Wikipedia's servers to overheat.

He wrote: "Wikipedia's down. Unfortunate timing just before Wikimania when most of the techies are travelling!"

Wikipedia, where users can contribute and edit material, is commonly used for checking online trivia, but it does sometimes suffer from inaccuracies.

The free website was launched by American entrepreneur Jimmy Wales in 2001 in a bid to bring together the sum of "all human knowledge".

Copyright © Press Association 2010

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