This seems to be a power outage at our European proxy caching cluster; we’ll see if we can give more details later.

European traffic has been rerouted to our US servers, but the extra load may cause the sites to be a little sluggish for now. (If your DNS is still seeing the old entries, you can manually configure your browser to use the US proxy: rr.pmtpa.wikimedia.org port 80. You should only do this temporarily, as you won’t be able to access anything *but* Wikipedia and our sister projects. :)

Update 21:13 UTC:

European servers are coming back online, we should have this cleaned up pretty soon.

Update 21:26 UTC:

We’re starting to switch traffic back to Europe. Should be better in a few minutes… In the meantime, amuse yourself reading the Twitter panic. :)

Update 21:40 UTC:

You can also use the SSL interface to Wikipedia, which doesn’t have the proxy overload.

Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect

It’s my pleasure to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has signed a strategic mobile and web partnership with Orange. Orange is one of the leading wireless and broadband internet providers in the world, and with this agreement we’ll begin integrating trademarked Wikipedia content onto their mobile and web channels. This is not just a way for me to improve my French (although that does need a lot of work. . .) – we’re also working with Orange to co-develop content channels and think about new ways to innovate and expand access to free knowledge. We’ve developed a QA as well dealing with aspects of the partnerships.

This is great news for Orange’s 175 million mobile customers and web users, as they’ll get better access to Wikipedia’s trove of knowledge throughout their daily lives. We’re starting out in the UK, Poland, Spain and France with plans to work together throughout Orange’s European footprint. This gets Wikipedia knowledge in front of more people in new ways, which helps us in our mission to expand knowledge to more people in more places. I especially want to praise all the volunteers who’ve made Wikipedia the world’s leading information resource. This partnership will help showcase their important work in front of more people than ever before.

I’ve been negotiating with Orange for a while, and I have been consistently impressed by their dedication to the Foundation’s mission of spreading free knowledge. They appreciate the importance of our community in everything we do, they’re committed to supporting neutral point-of-view, and they have an increasing interest in open source technology. The Foundation is always interested in business partnerships which understand our culture and help expand our mission, and Orange is an ideal partner for us.

This is an important new revenue stream to build on our successful fundraising campaigns. All the proceeds will go toward Wikimedia Foundation projects, with an emphasis on organizational sustainability and new services to make Wikipedia and our other projects better and easier to use. We’re a very lean nonprofit organization—just 27 of us help maintain the fourth-biggest website in the world—and this partnership will help us better support the vibrant community that makes Wikipedia possible.

Please join me in welcoming Orange as a new partner supporting the Wikimedia community!

Kul Wadhwa, Business Development<

We’re encountering some networking problems between our Tampa and Amsterdam data centers, which is breaking access to the sites for people in Europe. Mark’s poking to see if it can be resolved; if necessary we’ll reroute European visitors directly to the Tampa center.

Update: Has been resolved.