Wikipedia ask questions over redundancy failure

Wikipedia was back online yesterday after a fiber optic cable connection between two American data centers was cut. This caused an outage of an hour.

The cable line between Virginia and Florida was cut around 1PM GMT, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, who run Wikipedia.org. The websites were restored after an hour and the mobile service was restored by 3.35PM.

Wikimedia said in a blog post “We are now working with our network provider to determine how and why we were impacted by that fiber cut when we are supposed to have redundancy in our network.”

They added “We are still waiting for their report”.

The organisation have two separate fiber optic lines which connect the data centers, and one of those is meant to be configured as a backup in case of an issue.

Kitguru says: We would imagine they will get to the source of the problem and ensure this doesn't happen again.

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