The news about the hack first surfaced online officially via Wikipedia Twitter account.
https://twitter.com/Wikipedia/status/1170133355901251585
- Wikipedia
While it didn’t contain much information, Wikimedia Deutschland revealed details on Twitter. As disclosed, the Wikimedia servers suffered a huge DDoS attack that also affected the Wikipedia site.
https://twitter.com/WikimediaDE/status/1170077481447186432
- WikimediaDE
Later on, in a dedicated post by the Wikimedia Foundation, they explained that the site went offline following the attack in several regions.
“Today, Wikipedia was hit with a malicious attack that has taken it offline in several countries for intermittent periods.”
According to NetBlocks report, the attack happened in two phases, consequently impacting numerous locations with a near-total outage in the US.
Data indicate that the attack was initially staged in two phases, with the first briefly causing high latencies in the Americas from 6:00 p.m. UTC, and the second resulting in more severe outages across Western, Central and Eastern Europe, with disruptions also affecting the Middle East and South Asia.
The attack is ongoing and our Site Reliability Engineering team is working hard to stop it and restore access to the site.It turns out that the website recovered after 9 hours of an outage.
For now, the problem seems resolved as the site is now back online. Wikipedia has condemned such attacks deeming them a threat to “everyone’s fundamental rights” to access information.Update: Wikipedia is back online as of 02:40 UTC; a #DDoS attack variously targeting @Wikimedia infrastructure in the US and Europe has now caused ~9 hours of intermittent global outages #WikipediaDown 📉📈
📰 https://t.co/OyuN6MwxIH pic.twitter.com/Lnq2DkYr6h
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