Bad news, netizens: Wikipedia is currently inaccessible in China.



After trying to access the site multiple times without a VPN, one of the most popular websites around the world looks to be out of commission in cities and provinces in the PRC.

According to comparitech.com, a website used for checking the accessibility of sites from Chinese IP addresses, wikipedia.org appears to be down on the Chinese mainland.



Screengrab via comparitech.com

Meanwhile, another test site, greatfire.org, also confirms that Wikipedia is down. This could also be a temporary bug, as the site has been off and on in the country numerous times dating back to 2011, with the most recent outage prior to today occurring in July 2016, based on data from greatfire.org.



Screengrab via greatfire.org

While the website may just be down temporarily, like we saw with Microsoft search engine Bing earlier this year, if Wikipedia remains permanently inaccessible it would be a crushing blow to all who enjoy accessing the world’s largest free online encyclopedia.

Here’s to wishful thinking...

[Cover image via Wikipedia]