August 18, 2006 3:31 PM PDT

Wikipedia shut down for several hours

by Daniel Terdiman
  • Font size
  • Print
  • Post a comment

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.

Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between. E-mail Daniel.
Recent posts from News Blog
Nvidia puts NForce chipset development on hold
Opera 10 browser is here
Neil Young Archives Blu-ray: Rip off?
Acronis revises survey results about backup habits
Acronis miscalculates data on users' bad backup habits
Flickr co-founder presses beta button
Comcast, Sony open retail store
Cox to try coaxing the Internet into submission
advertisement

15 sites that went kaput in 2009

Web sites launch all the time, but they also shut their doors. We highlight 15 that bit the dust this year.

Top 10 news stories of the decade

Let the debate begin: Was the iPhone more important than iTunes? Was anything bigger than Google finding a great business model? CNET offers its list of the 10 most important stories of the '00s.

About News Blog

Recent posts on technology, trends, and more.

Add this feed to your online news reader

advertisement
advertisement

Inside CNET News

Scroll Left Scroll Right