Network data shows that Wikipedia servers have become temporarily unavailable internationally as of 12:25 p.m. UTC. Measurements suggest the outage is caused by technical issues and not related to blocking.
The incident triggered fears of censorship in some countries but global NetBlocks internet observatory data indicates that the incident is not related to filtering or blocking, and is rather likely caused by a denial of service (DDoS) attack or configuration error. Impact has been observed affecting all language editions of Wikipedia across all continents.
Confirmed: Wikipedia is experiencing global outages as of 12:25 p.m. UTC; network data confirms incident not related to internet filtering or censorship 📉https://t.co/wIznkhkZ1n pic.twitter.com/reKkI2Pxje
— NetBlocks (@netblocks) May 15, 2019
Methodology
Internet performance and service reachability are determined via NetBlocks web probe privacy-preserving analytics. Each measurement consists of latency round trip time, outage type and autonomous system number aggregated in real-time to assess service availability and latency in a given country. Network providers and locations are enumerated as vantage point pairs. The root cause of a service outage may be additionally corroborated by means of traffic analysis and manual testing as detailed in the report.
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