A technical outage left millions of Wikipedia users unable to use the site this morning. Wikimedia said "networking issues" were to blame.
Wikipedia struggled this morning as users took to Twitter and other social media sites to vent their frustration.
The world's largest online encyclopedia began to struggle at around 6:30 a.m. PT, with an error message on the site's front page stating that its "servers are currently experiencing a technical problem."
When users navigated to Wikipedia pages, pages part loaded, stripping out much of the site's content styles and layout. The site loaded slowly, but many reported that Wikipedia's homepage was inaccessible.
The site's error message advised the the site "should be fixed soon." Just after an hour later, the site appeared to be fully functional.
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A Wikimedia tweet said its "engineers are working on [the issues]" and that the site would be back "soon," despite offering no estimated time frame for the site's recovery.
Wikipedia's status page showed a sea of orange warning and red critical messages warning of "service disruption," but within half an hour many were upgraded to orange or green -- signaling the all-clear. Wikipedia's mobile site was unaffected during the outage.
A Wikimedia spokesperson told CNET in an emailed statement that the outage was "due to networking issues with servers in Tampa, Florida" but did not have any further technical information at the time of publication.
"We certainly haven't been hit by a denial of service attack," ruling out foul play by a third party.
The spokesperson noted around half an hour into the outage that "the sites should be up and running again now, to a point." While text and images were displayed, the site's stylesheets failed to load. The site now is now back on its feet again.
Update at 7:30 a.m. PT with Wikimedia statement.
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