Users looking to Wikipedia for answers this morning were likely disappointed; the site was inaccessible thanks to an outage.
"We're having some technical issues, but our engineers are working on it. We'll be back soon!" the site tweeted about an hour ago.
On the service's performance and availability status page, Wikipedia reported service disruptions with its API, https services, mail, payments, Ubuntu mirror, the Wiki platform, the Wikimedia blog, the main page of the Wikimedia Foundation, and more.
A few other functions - like the DNS and images and media - were experiencing "performance issues," Wikipedia said, while others - like the mobile site - were operating normally.
At PCMag, Wikipedia was not experiencing any issues around 10:35 a.m. Eastern. But others were not so lucky, taking to Twitter to discuss. As one person joked, "Good thing it's summer, students."
"Wikipedia is down? Now I can't look up how often that's happened!" another Twitter user quipped.
The last large-scale Wikipedia "outage" was likely in January, when Wikipedia intentionally went dark for one day in protest of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. As the amusing (sad?) slideshow below illustrates, not everyone got the memo.
Wikipedia, meanwhile, is just the latest site to experience stability issues. Last month, Twitter and Google Talk experienced an outage on the same day. Twitter blamed the problem on two data centers failing at the same time.
UPDATE: By Monday afternoon, Wikipedia tweeted that its "sites are mostly back up now." The organization blamed the outage on "a fiber optic cable cut near our Florida data center" and promised more information shortly.
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