Wikipedia Goes Dark Across Europe, Middle East After DDOS Attack

Wikipedia Goes Dark Across Europe, Middle East After DDOS Attack

Wikipedia went offline Friday afternoon and into Saturday morning after a cyber attack forced an international shutdown. The outage affected millions of users across Europe and in parts of the Middle East.

A spokesperson from Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia, blamed the “malicious attack” on “bad actors” in a blog post Saturday.

While the post doesn’t go into detail about what exactly happened, Wikimedia’s German Twitter account confirmed that a wide-ranging DDOS attack drove the online encyclopaedia offline. Just as a refresher for any less-techie folks out there, a distributed denial-of-service attack is when hackers overwhelm a server or network with more traffic than it can handle in the hopes of shutting it down.

Wikimedia’s post trashed the cyber attackers in no uncertain terms, particularly spelling out why, for a free resource as ubiquitous as Wikipedia, being down for any length of time carries some serious risks:

We condemn these sorts of attacks. They’re not just about taking Wikipedia offline. Takedown attacks threaten everyone’s fundamental rights to freely access and share information. We in the Wikimedia movement and Foundation are committed to protecting these rights for everyone.

The group is still working to restore access “wherever you might be reading Wikipedia in the world” and promised future updates in its post. Early Saturday afternoon, Techcrunch reported that Wikipedia continued to remain offline in parts of the United Kingdom, Poland, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy. Several user reports on Down Detector have since indicated that Poland and the Netherlands have regained access.

Gizmodo has reached out to Wikipedia for comment and will update this story should they respond.


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