Wikipedia shut down for several hours

Wikipedia suffered a shutdown for about 2-1/2 hours Friday, one of the longest outages in the online encyclopedia's history.

According to Jimmy Wales, the site's founder, the outage was caused by a dispute between Wikipedia's ISP, Cogent, and its hosting service, PowerMedium.

Wales said that the dispute had nothing to do with Wikipedia, but rather involved what Wikipedia was told were other "bad" customers. However, when Cogent pulled a block of IP addresses, the group of addresses Wikipedia was leasing were included, and the site went down.

The dispute was resolved Friday, but Wales said that Wikipedia has to give back the leased IP addresses by Monday. It will then begin using a different set of IP addresses for its several hundred servers.