Wikipedia was inaccessible from about 11:20 to 19:00 UTC this
evening/morning/whatever it is where you are.
The problem seems to have been triggered by a runaway database query on
the francophone wikipedia; unfortunately coming during our busiest time
of day everything just ground to a halt.
I'll try to rig up some better protection from accidents of this sort in
the future (automatic timeouts/kills for slow manual queries); in the
meantime, sysops always be careful with your queries! Treat our server
gentle, and she'll be good to you in return.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)