Wikipedia forced offline after server cable severed
Wikipedia has been forced offline for a period of two hours after a server cable was accidentally severed at its Florida data centre.
The mishap occurred at an overland section of cabling between Tampa and Virginia with contractors taking 2 hours to reconnect the vital link.
Normal service then resumed although some services were still not fully accessible.
The online encyclopaedia is regarded as robust with outages such as this rare but there are no suggestions of foul play.
The incident does however highlight the ephemeral nature of data stored in the cloud with information potentially switched off at a blink - prompting many Twitter users to jest that they were digging out their print encyclopaedias.