Is Wikipedia down?
Live status for Wikipedia (https://wikipedia.org)
Last 24 hours
Loading…In the 24 hours before 2026-07-17 (UTC), Wikipedia answered 95 of our 95 checks — 100% uptime with an average response of 785ms.
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About Wikipedia outages
Wikipedia is the free encyclopedia run by the Wikimedia Foundation on donation-funded infrastructure. It is remarkably reliable for its scale; brief read-only periods during maintenance are more common than true outages.
Wikipedia publishes official incident updates at its status page — worth checking alongside our live test above.
What to do when Wikipedia is down
- Try a different language edition, such as en.wikipedia.org versus de.wikipedia.org, since editions can be affected differently during regional routing or caching issues.
- Switch to the Wikipedia mobile site at en.m.wikipedia.org or the official app if the desktop site is slow, since they use separate rendering paths that can differ under load.
- If pages load but edits fail with a database-lock message, Wikimedia has switched to read-only mode — no local fix applies, and editing resumes automatically afterward.
- Try loading the site over mobile data if it fails on your network only, since school and workplace filters commonly block Wikipedia while the site itself is healthy.
Wikipedia alternatives to use in the meantime
While Wikipedia is unreachable, cached copies of most articles are available through the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org or a search engine's cached page view, though these may lag recent edits. Encyclopaedia Britannica covers major topics with editorial review, and for quick factual lookups a search engine's knowledge panel often surfaces the same underlying information. Offline readers such as Kiwix serve full Wikipedia snapshots with no connection to Wikimedia's servers at all.
Wikipedia FAQ
Why is Wikipedia read-only right now?
Wikimedia occasionally switches Wikipedia to read-only mode during database maintenance or data-center failovers — articles stay readable but editing pauses. These windows are planned, brief, and announced on the Wikimedia status page.
Wikipedia won’t load — is it blocked on my network?
Some schools, offices, and countries filter Wikipedia, which looks like an outage from inside the network. If our external check reaches wikipedia.org while you cannot, and other sites work, a local content filter or DNS block is the probable cause.
Is Wikipedia down for everyone or just me?
We test Wikipedia (https://wikipedia.org) live from our own servers. If our check succeeds but you still can't connect, the outage is probably local to you — try another network or device, clear your cache, or check Wikipedia's official status channels.
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