Overview
On September 6, 2019, Wikipedia suffered a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack, which disrupted access to its servers for almost nine hours. The attack overwhelmed Wikipedia’s infrastructure with an enormous amount of traffic, making the service unavailable across many regions.
Technical Details
The DDoS attack flooded Wikipedia’s servers with malicious traffic, causing packet loss of up to 60% and leading to significant latency and availability issues. This prevented users from accessing the website and caused a drastic increase in response times.
Impact
- Global Outage: The attack caused Wikipedia to go down for nearly nine hours, disrupting millions of users worldwide who rely on it for information.
- Mitigation Efforts: Wikipedia’s technical team worked to mitigate the attack by rerouting traffic and deploying DDoS mitigation tools, but the attack’s scale made recovery slow.
Lessons Learned
This attack underlined the ongoing threat posed by DDoS attacks on critical online services and emphasized the need for robust DDoS protection strategies.
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