Updated on Oct. 21 at 12:03 p.m. ET — A spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, told Mashable that the outage was related to newly discovered security vulnerabilities in PHP, which is what Wikipedia is built on.
“The Wikimedia Foundation is currently in the process of addressing security vulnerabilities in PHP, the programming language that underpins most wikis, including the Wikimedia projects. This issue affects all known versions of PHP, and is not specific to the Wikimedia Foundation," the spokesperson said. "All Foundation-supported systems and volunteer-run systems that use PHP are affected. We have taken down a number of other systems as a precautionary measure until they can be safely patched.”
Two of the best internet repositories of information appeared to go down on Wednesday morning.
Visitors to both the Internet Archive and Wikipedia, to be more specific, reported outages at the start of hump day. According to DownDetector, both sites started experiencing problems sometime around 10 or 11 a.m. ET. Mashable reached out to the Internet Archive for comment, and we will update this article if we hear back.
As of this writing, the Internet Archive website, the host of the popular Wayback Machine, which lets users see historical versions of popular webpages, returned a connection timeout error message for Mashable reporters. (The Wikipedia website was still accessible, however.)
The Internet Archive confirmed the site was experiencing problems in a message posted to X on Wednesday morning:
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The Wikimedia status page listed an ongoing incident for Oct. 21 with the following message: "Unresolved incident: Emergency Maintenance."
It's unclear if these outages are related to each other in any way, aside from the fact that both sites are famous places to find access to information online.
This story is developing...