Wikipedia has gone offline since Friday afternoon for a couple of days due to the cyber attack hit across the world. Wikipedia had suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which resulted to fall down their sites along part of Europe and Middle East. Users mainly in UK, Italy Germany, France, Netherland, Poland and Middle East were affected by the outage.

Through DDoS attacks Hackers attempt to make a website or computer unavailable by flooding or crashing the website with too much traffic. These attacks target websites and online services with the aim of overwhelming them with more traffic than the server or network can accommodate.

The outage Downdetector reports that Wikipedia was offline for several hours and was able to restore again. A spokesman from Wikipedia’s parent company, Wikimedia has blamed the malicious attack in a blog post Saturday. German twitter of Wikipedia has posted “The Wikimedia server…is currently being paralyzed by a massive and very broad DDoS — a distributed denial of service] attack.”

Wikimedia added a statement for users after the attack: “As one of the world’s most popular sites, Wikipedia sometimes attracts “bad faith” actors. Along with the rest of the web, we operate in an increasingly sophisticated and complex environment where threats are continuously evolving. Because of this, the Wikimedia communities and Wikimedia Foundation have created dedicated systems and staff to regularly monitor and address risks. If a problem occurs, we learn, we improve, and we prepare to be better for next time.”

Further it said” Takedown attacks threaten everyone’s fundamental rights to freely access and share information. We in the Wikimedia movement and Foundation are committed to protecting these rights for everyone.”

However, Wikimedia Foundation and its communities have built up a team and a dedicated system to address sudden risks and manage them after this tragic incident. Now the outage is fixed and users can access to the site.