Wikipedia is down for many: Here’s what we know about the outage
Phew, it’s back
Good news, it looks like the Wikipedia outage was short-lived, or at least it only lasted an hour.
Downdetector reports have dropped back to zero, suggesting that “emergency maintenance” has now ended.
Fortunately, all of that was much easier than the Major PHP flaw that obscured government websites and sent website administrators scamming…
‘Emergency maintenance’
This probably explains Wikipedia’s current problems: the The Wikimedia Foundation’s status page says “emergency maintenance” is underway.
The foundation hasn’t explained how long the maintenance will last or what it’s for, but hopefully that means it will be short-lived…
Please try again later…
THIS IS THE FIRST TIME, HAVE I NEVER SEEN WIKIPEDIA FALL LIKE THIS? everything except the index page does not load… ehhh??? https://t.co/5DtJ51QIkiOctober 21, 2026
This is what Wikipedia and Wikimedia currently look like to many users: an “error” page with a “try again later” message. I’ve never seen it like this either, although it works well for me in the UK.
Interestingly, there are a few other outages running simultaneously right now, including Asana and Internet Archive. It’s not yet clear if they are related, but they started at very similar times (around 10am ET / 3pm BST). However, Wikipedia is undoubtedly the most affected.
A sharp increase in reports
Wikipedia works well for me here in the UK, but it doesn’t for thousands of users at the moment – the reporting graph on Downdetector is now over 3,000 in the US, and is also increasing in the UK.
The cause is unclear so far, as there are no current issues with major cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud or Cloudflare. I will delve into this and report back shortly…
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