Wikipedia was down for many—here's what we know about the outage

Wikipedia has gone down for many users around the world, according to Downdetector — and the Internet Archive and Asana also seem to be having similar wobbles.

The problems started at around 10.51am ET / 3.51pm BST, when a large spike in reports appeared on the outage-tracking website — at the time of writing the number of reports stands at over 3,000.

It isn't yet clear what's caused the outage, but you can follow all of the live updates here...

A sharp spike in reports (Image credit: Downdetector) Wikipedia is working okay for me here in the UK, but it isn't for thousands of users right now — the reports graph on Downdetector is now over 3,000 in the US, and it's climbing in the UK too.

The cause is so far unclear, as there are no current issues at the major cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud or Cloudflare.

I'll be digging into this and reporting back shortly...

October 21, 2026 – 11:57 AM Please try again later...

THAT’S A FIRST, I HAVE NEVER SEEN WIKIPEDIA GO DOWN LIKE THIS?everything but the index page fails to load… huhhh??? https://t.co/5DtJ51QIki October 21, 2026 This is what Wikipedia and Wikimedia currently look like for many users — an "error" page with a "please try again later" message.

I've also never seen it go down like that, although it's working fine for me in the UK.

Strangely, there are a few other outages running concurrently right now, including Asana and the Internet Archive.

It isn't yet clear if they're related, but they did start at very similar times (around 10am ET / 3pm BST).

Wikipedia is certainly the worst-hit, though.