The German version of the online lexicon Wikipedia and some other issues in Europe have been paralyzed on Friday by an online attack. The society Wikimedia Germany reported on Friday evening of a so-called DDOS attack. In such attacks, servers are bombarded with a barrage of pointless requests until they drop to their knees.
Large websites usually have protection mechanisms against it. The Wikimedia spoke now of a "massive and very broad" attack. Shortly before midnight, the Wikipedia pages were briefly recalled; after that nothing went again. Also users among other things in Great Britain and France reported problems.
The Wikimedia servers of the @Wikimedia Foundation, on which Wikipedia is also hosted, are being paralyzed by a massive and very broad DDoS attack. #Wikipedia and its sister projects are therefore temporarily unavailable. Sorry! https://t.co/fAemzOGhfm
- WikimediaGermany (@WikimediaDE) September 6, 2019At Twitter, unknown people announced behind a newly created account, they were behind it. To substantiate the claim's authenticity, they announced shortly before midnight that they would suspend the attack for a short time before being rebooted. During this period, the online encyclopedia was actually reachable. They wanted to try new attack tools and the attack would be stopped after a few hours, it said in the Twitter account.
On Saturday morning Wikipedia was reachable again in Germany.