On September 11, Wikipedia experienced significant downtime, impacting thousands of users. Reports indicated that over 1,000 individuals were encountering issues accessing the site, as noted by Downdetector, a platform that monitors internet outages. In response to the disruption, many users took to social media to express their frustration and seek information about the outage.
The site also noted that users had been facing problems since 10:24pm ET. As per Wikipedia’s official description, it is ‘a free encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of nearly 260,000 volunteers. Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages, which together comprise over 63 million articles and attract more than 15 billion views every month,” the description further reads .
However, Wikipedia is yet to comment on the current reported outage and no cause for it is known either. As per Downdetector, most people faced issues with the website. The map showed that places like Chicago , Washington, Boston, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles were among the worst hit. “It is the largest and most-read reference work in history, and is consistently ranked among the ten most visited websites. It remains unknown when the issue will get resolved. Meanwhile, people complained given that many use Wikipedia for day to day information.
Usually a 429 or Too Many Requests error means that Wikipedia’s servers have gotten too many requests from a single device or IP address in a short time. Because i can click on links from the front page, but whenever I type queries into the search bar, it gives me ‘Error Too many requests’, one person explained the issue in the Downdetector comment section saying “The front page seems to be working.
Another wrote “Never ever seen Wikipedia down before im crying”. Yet another said “In all my years alive, I have never seen Wikipedia go down. They added that they were facing the issue on Safari browser but not on Firefox. Several people took to X as well. “Wikipedia may be down right now — something’s off. Anything broken on your end?,” one mentioned . One person also remarked that it was interesting for Wikipedia to go down since they are ‘self-hosted’, that is , they do not rely on any other servers for functioning. One can try and fix this by waiting for a few minutes since the server usually lifts the temporary rate limit after a small cooling period, clearing browser data, including cache and cookies for Wikipedia to clear corrupted session data, disabling browser extensions, switching the network or using a VPN, and checking automated scripts or APIs. However, this error is also seen when there is an outage on the site’s side and given the number of people facing this issue, user-end fixes are unlikely to solve the problem.
