An overheating problem, probably initiating at the European data center of Wikipedia, resulted in a major service outage, bringing the free encyclopedia site down for almost two hours from around 1 p. m. EST onwards.

As per the information forwarded by Wikipedia sources, the site went offline after the overheating issue began with their European servers, and broke down the cooling mechanisms, causing a DNS resolution failure.

Noting that the shutting down of the servers further led to more problems, Wikipedia said in a statement: “As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place that changes our DNS entries.”

The statement further said that within minutes of doing the failover switch, “it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally.”

However, almost an hour after the transfer, the servers were restored and cleared of their cache; and the site became free of the problem by around 3 p. m. EST, as per the declaration on its official Twitter account.

Even though Wikipedia is now back online, the constant overheating at the Amsterdam data center may still cause some service glitches; thereby affecting a section of the Wikipedia users.