Friday night I was trying to settle an argument. A stupid one — whether the guy who played Radagast in the Hobbit movies is the same guy who played Doc Brown. (He is. Sylvester McCoy is not Christopher Lloyd, I was wrong, whatever.) I went to Wikipedia to prove my point and got... nothing. A blank page. Then an error. Then a page that loaded halfway and just sat there spinning like it forgot what it was doing.
My first instinct, like anyone's, was to blame my own internet. Rebooted the router. Checked if Twitter was loading (it was). Tried Wikipedia again on my phone over LTE instead of wifi, thinking maybe my ISP had some routing problem going on. Still broken. That's usually the moment you realize it's not you, it's them.
Turned out it wasn't a random blip. The Wikimedia Foundation confirmed over the weekend that Wikipedia was hit with a deliberate attack, the kind where someone floods your servers with garbage traffic until the real traffic can't get through. A DDoS, distributed denial of service, the internet equivalent of ten thousand people calling a restaurant at once just to keep anyone with an actual reservation from getting through. Users across Germany, other parts of Europe, and some countries in the Middle East were seeing the outages worst, though it wasn't consistent, which is sort of the nature of these things — it comes and goes depending on which servers are getting hammered at any given moment.
What got me thinking, after I gave up and just told my friend "trust me, I'm right, look it up yourself later," is how weird it is that Wikipedia going down for a few hours felt like a bigger deal than it probably should have. Not because the info in the argument mattered (it didn't, not even a little). But because I use that site constantly without ever thinking about it as infrastructure. I check it the way I check the time. Population of a city, release date of a movie, the plot of a book I read in high school and half-remember, the actual chemical name of something I'm putting in my body. It's become this weird utility, like electricity, and you only notice it's a utility when it's not there.
And Wikipedia doesn't run ads. No login wall, no paywall, nothing trying to sell me a subscription while I'm mid-argument about Radagast. It survives on donations and a nonprofit structure that's honestly a little miraculous given how much traffic it eats. Which makes it a weirdly appealing target too, I guess, if you're the kind of person who gets something out of taking down a huge site just to prove you can. No group had claimed responsibility as of that weekend, and honestly these things rarely get a satisfying explanation. You don't usually get a villain with a manifesto. You get a foundation's comms team saying "we are aware of an issue" and then a slow fade back to normal a day or two later.
I don't think this is a story that needed a giant reaction piece, and I'm not going to pretend it's some huge turning point for internet security or whatever. It's a website going down for a while. It happens. But it did remind me how little redundancy most of us have built into our daily information habits. I don't have a backup for "quickly check a fact." I just assume it'll be there. Same way I assume the tap water will run when I turn the handle.
Anyway I looked it up again this morning once things were back, and yes, Sylvester McCoy, Radagast, not Christopher Lloyd. I was right. I'm annoyed it took a global outage and about eighteen hours to confirm something I already knew.
If you noticed the same thing over the weekend and thought your wifi was broken too, it wasn't just you. Small comfort, but there it is.