Wikimedia sites database locked, takes hour to get back to normal

September 15, 2006

Today at 20:30 (UTC), Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and other projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation suffered downtime. The database was locked so no edits could be made. The Recent changes on Wikipedia were very slow.

The message said: The Wikimedia Foundation system administrator who locked the database offered this explanation: "Applying a database update, will be in read-only mode for a few minutes."

Instead of a few minutes, it took an hour.

As of 21:38, Wikipedia and other projects are now working.