World’s most popular yet versatile encyclopedia portal Wikipedia went offline from Friday afternoon till Saturday morning after falling prey to a major cyber attack.
The company made the announcement of the attack via its official Twitter handle on Friday noon as…
Wikipedia has been experiencing intermittent outages today as a result of a malicious attack. We’re continuing to work on restoring access. #wikipediadown
— Wikipedia (@Wikipedia) September 7, 2019
And soon after, came up with another tweet assuring to settle the damage of the attack…
Today, Wikipedia was hit with a malicious attack that has taken it offline in several countries for intermittent periods. The attack is ongoing; our Site Reliability Engineering team is working hard to stop it and restore access to the site. https://t.co/cu9AXWFaTG #Wikipediadown
— Wikimedia (@Wikimedia) September 7, 2019
The attack was identified as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack that majorly affected users in UK, France, Germany and Italy.
An article from Wikipedia’s parent company, Wikimedia reads…
“malicious attack that has taken it offline in several countries for intermittent periods,” with the company’s German Twitter account said its server was “paralysed by a massive and very broad DDoS attack.”
“As one of the world’s most popular sites, Wikipedia sometimes attracts ‘bad faith’ actors. Along with the rest of the web, we operate in an increasingly sophisticated and complex environment where threats are continuously evolving. Because of this, the Wikimedia communities and Wikimedia Foundation have created dedicated systems and staff to regularly monitor and address risks. If a problem occurs, we learn, we improve, and we prepare to be better for next time.“
“We condemn these sorts of attacks. They’re not just about taking Wikipedia offline. Takedown attacks threaten everyone’s fundamental rights to freely access and share information. We in the Wikimedia movement and Foundation are committed to protecting these rights for everyone.”
The site got restored back on Saturday i.e. 7 September 2019.
ⓘ Source: Wikimediafoundation.org
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