Wikipedia was hit by a Distributed denial of service(DDoS) on Friday this week disrupting few of its servers, thus making its services inaccessible for users from hailing from parts of Europe, North America, and the Middle East.
Late on Friday, the company tweeted through the organizations Germany account that the attack was malicious and could have been the work of a foreign country invasion.
In a separate statement released by Wikipedia Foundation on Saturday, the world most popular website and largest encyclopedia said that it’s IT teams were working to restore access as soon as possible. The statement added that the attack was contained and managed to target only five of its major servers.
DDOS is a kind of malicious cyber-attack which involves bots operated by remote hackers’ access servers with fake traffic. As the web traffic puts tremendous pressure on the computing servers, they get disrupted throwing services offline for minutes or hours in general.
Who was behind the attack and what was the reason to disrupt the servers of Wikipedia is yet to be known.
Note 1- Wikipedia is said to house over 5,925,299 articles as per the stats available by Sept 6th of this year. The company is a non-profit organization founded on January 15th of 2001 and is said to be used over 11.5 Gigabytes of data in compressed format.
Note 2- Cyber Attacks on publications is common these days. But an attack on a nonprofit organization sounds strange. But the attackers might have launched the attack intending to warn the site founders to restrict their theory against any protest/ retaliation/ concern.
