Wikipedia blames malicious DDOS attack after site goes down across Europe, Middle East

Wikipedia was forced offline in several countries Friday after a cyber attack hit the global encyclopedia.

Users across Europe and parts of the Middle East experienced outages shortly before 7pm, BST, according to downdetector.com.

Wikimedia's German Twitter account posted: "The Wikimedia server"is currently being paralysed by a massive and very broad DDOS [distributed denial of service] attack."

The site issued the following statement:

Today, Wikipedia was hit with a malicious attack that has taken it offline in several countries for intermittent periods. The attack is ongoing and our Site Reliability Engineering team is working hard to stop it and restore access to the site.

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.

We condemn these sorts of attacks. They're not just about taking Wikipedia offline. 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.

Right now, we're continuing to work to restore access wherever you might be reading Wikipedia in the world. We'll keep you posted."

The site was reported to be down in large parts of the UK as well as Poland, France, Germany and Italy.